Idioms and sayings

Lesson opening

This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.

Idioms and sayings: when words stop meaning what they say

You already know that a Serbian word rarely walks alone: a decision is brought, coffee is strong, and custom rather than logic picks the partner (the lesson “Words that go together”). An idiom is the next step: the meaning of the whole no longer adds up from its parts. Pukla je tikva. Literally “the gourd has burst”, but it means the friendship is over. Ni luk jeo, ni luk mirisao. “He neither ate the onion nor smelled it”, that is, “he had nothing whatsoever to do with it”. A dictionary will give you the gourd and the onion, but not the meaning: an idiom is stored in memory as one chunk, like a long word. At B2 you are expected to do three things: recognise the common idioms in conversation and on the news, understand them from context, and use a handful of the everyday ones in the right place, without translating English idioms word for word.

What you may change inside an idiom, and what you may not

An idiom is not a fossil: the verb in it follows the ordinary rules, while the nouns and their prepositions are frozen.

The nouns, though, are untouchable: case, number and preposition are locked. držati jezik za zubima “to hold your tongue” (literally “behind the teeth”) takes the plural only; u četiri oka exists in this one form only. Nor can you swap a word for another, even a close one: “praviti od muve kravu”, with a cow in place of praviti od muve slona, will strike a Serb not as a joke but as a mistake.

Note the last row of the table: in idioms about feelings, the person who feels is marked by a short dative, mi, ti, mu, not by a possessive (the lesson “Possessive dative”): Pao mi je kamen sa srca. “A weight has been lifted off my mind” (literally “a stone fell from my heart”). “Pao je moj kamen” is impossible.

The body as a dictionary: idioms about parts of the body

Body-part idioms are the largest and most frequent group; you know their words from the lesson “Body & health”. Half of them will look familiar, which makes the other half dangerous.

One false friend: vući nekoga za nos looks like “to lead someone by the nose”, but it means to string someone along with promises, not to dominate them.

Animals, plants and other creatures

The second-largest class. The images are often shared with English, but the creature often differs, and you cannot slip the English one in.

Cheat sheet

The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.

Idioms and sayings

Idiom: ready-made, frozen, more than its parts. Partnership jaka kafa: strong coffee; idiom mačji kašalj “a trifle”: no cat, no cough.

What changes, what is frozen

The body

Creatures and similes

Proverbs

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English vs Serbian image