Bilingual Expressions (English/Spanish)

Every language has its own peculiar expressions.  These expressions do not make sense outside their cultural context.  In English, for example, what does it mean to: ‘to be like a cat on a hot tin roof,’  to cut a record, to make one’s bed and sleep in it, to back down, or ‘to be water under the bridge’?  These expressions, used everywhere in the language, are one of the main reasons why it is so difficult to understand a language which is not one’s own.  The problem with these expressions is that they are idiomatic.  What kind of expression is an idiomatic expression?  An idiomatic expression is an expression whose meaning is not predictable from the usual grammatical rules of a language or from the usual meaning of its constituent elements.  Other than living in the country where the language is spoken, memorization is the only way that these type of idioms are learnt.  To say that these idiomatic expressions are important is one of the great understatements. Wylcomenetwork.com istudycards Popular Bilingual Expressions were especially developed to help Spanish- speaking persons to learn the meaning of some of the most frequently-used and familiar expressions in the English language.  Each expression has been translated into either standard Spanish, or, whenever possible, into the corresponding idiomatic expression in Spanish.  Therefore, they can be used by either persons who speak English and who want to learn Spanish or for persons who speak Spanish and who want to learn English.