It's really important for
all of us, as learners, to be relaxed when speaking English. Being relaxed
makes the words come naturally from the brain to the mouth and in this way we
make ourselves more understandable when talking.
Idioms are a really nice way to be relaxed, and they're useful to not
think about grammar. But what are idioms? You might be wondering. We could say
that an idiom is an expression that cannot be understood if we try to look for
the meaning of each word of the sentence, it’s kind of the same as slang,
but the difference is that slang is much more informal, actually slang
sometimes could sound a little rude.
On this article I want to focus a
little bit on four really common Idioms that I hear all the time on native
English speakers.
- Hang Out: I heard this expression from an American friend of mine, we were chatting on the internet and I asked her: “So … where are we gonna go this afternoon?” and then she answered “Oh! My friends and I are going to hang out at the mall. You gotta come!” Of course I didn’t understand the meaning of “hang out”, I was like: “What in the world are you gonna do?” She explained to me that “hang out” means to spend time with someone with no reason, in this case, it meant something like, chill with friends at the mall or just to stay with friends at the mall, so what they were going to do was just go to the mall, talk, perhaps eat something, laugh, etc.
- Up to…you, me, her, anyone or anything: When I heard this expression, I was watching a tutorial on YouTube to learn how to connect my Xbox 360 to my PC screen, so the guy who was talking show how to do this in two different ways and at the end of the video he said: “alright, you can do this in the way you want, it’s all up to you” I didn’t catch the meaning of what he said, so I went to Google and typed “what does up to you means?” and I figured out that this idiom means, it’s your choice or the decision is yours.
- Take Advantage of: I remember this expression from a movie, there was a guy who was gonna go to jail and he was talking to his lawyer and the lawyer told to the guy: “You need to take advantage of your rights”, this time I realized the meaning of the expression because of the context, I figured out that “take advantage of” means to use something for someone’s benefit or use something to get an advantage or a benefit.
- Take Over: I learned this idiom thanks to AJ Hoge, the director of Effortless English, I was listening to one of his lessons and he was talking about a guy in the US who was a principal in a school, so AJ said “when he took over the school…” He explained that “took over” or “take over” means to take control on something, so what AJ said was: “when he started to control the school…”
As you can see idioms are phrases or sentences that have a meaning to
express something and you don’t need to think about grammar when you tell them,
in fact, if you use idioms you are going to sound more natural and cool.
Also I want to highlight the things I did to learn the idioms I posted
on today’s articles, notice that I listened to English a lot, I talked to
friends, watched videos, movies, mp3 recordings, and that’s what you have to
do, you need to make English part of your daily life, you have to listen to
English every day and I’m sure you will learn to speak English powerfully.
REMEMBER: Idioms will
make you sound more natural and they’ll help you to not think about grammar.
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