c’est l’équivalent de “se plonger”! 
AHHHH je comprends maintenant, merci 
WOW, belle citation :hap:
li bgha la3ssal yssbar 3la kriss n7el
WOW ^^ that’s a reeeall good one 
thnx
lli bgha azzayn ysbr 3ala tqqb lwuzznayn.
7bl lkthab qsir
Allahuma imma al3amash owla l3amma
alqard fi 3ayni ummih ghazal
imma mali7 am massoos
And for the English sayings…
No pain, no gain
You can’t hide your lying eyes.
The one eyed man is king in the land of the blind.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Some days you get the bear, and some days the bear gets you.
two heads are better than one
i don’t think that is tlaking about headteachers; two would be a disaster
What are “headteachers”? How about, “Too many cooks spoil the soup.” and then there’s, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” Tell me, what do you guys imagine that last one means? I’ll let you know after I see an attempt or two, alright?
okay here is my attempt: isn’t it kinda like ‘don’t judge a book by it’s cover’ ?? like, a gift horse would be GREAT, but if you look in its mouth, it won’t look so great (ugly). so look at the horse as a whole, not it’s mouth… LOL ??
and headteachers, like headmistress we call it headteacher here :hap:
That’s sounds like the German saying “Einem geschenkten Gaul schaut man nicht ins Maul.” (Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth)
You know, it’s possible that my grandfather brought that saying with him from Germany. He also used to always say, “You take a Deutchman for what he means, not what he says.” Is that something he figured out here because the immigrants were always using a word which was slightly off when they spoke English, or is it an actual saying in your country? I do know that not looking a gift horse in the mouth is more wide spread than to have been only from my grandfather, but, as you noticed, there are a lot of Americans with German ancestry. My Grandmother’s parents were the immigrants from her side, and she didn’t learn to speak German, though my grandfather did. So, my Grandfather tried to pass the language on to his kids without the help of his wife, who could only understand. And the result was my uncle is fluent, and my mom is language-phobic. My dad knows German. Me, no. And, on another note, in the 1930s/40s it was considered suspect to speak German in certain parts of the USA. My family in New England intentionally did not teach the children German. They only learned semi-explicatives, like, "Ah, that’s really hot."which, naturally, come out of the mouths of the speaker in native tongue.
I found sometime ago an interesting list of German word used in (American-)English. Really funny some words, but other also really sad . I think it’s really sad that people don’t keep on teaching their mothers tongue to their children. Oh, and I translated that saying with an online dictionary with had the hole saying.
so what does it mean then? :hap: or are we still waiting for more tries?
That was explain in an other tread.
Nuwwara, I just read the rest of this post starting from the instance of your name, and it occurs to me that you might think I am attacking you with it. I want to make it clear that I am not attacking you at all; I agree that it is sad that the mother tongues of the immigrants here are. largely, lost to successive generations. That does, though, have some advantages in integrating new communities into the country. Balkanization is not to be sought, after all. And, I do wish I knew German. I love languages, period. So, on to what I wrote earlier, and please understand where I am coming from in it.
Nuwwara, it is not an easy thing to pass on a second language in an environment which has no practical applications to which said language can be put. I have given my all to trying to teach my girls Arabic; they even have it as an Academic subject at their school, but, alas, the Arabic Department has a tremendously hard time executing its objective. The teachers are confronted with children from, I kid you not, more than eighty countries. You have to pass an English proficiency exam and some other tests to be admitted, including Qur’an memorization (small suwar for the little ones; not the whole thing.) and Islamic Studies knowledge and even you have to show them that you know how to make wudu and pray. The Islamic Studies department seems to have less trouble than Arabic does. I mean, you get kids who speak colloquial Arabic and kids who speak no Arabic and teachers want to make it easier for the ones who know something, so they step outside of Fus7a. Once you step outside of Fus7a in an Arabic department, its all down hill. From the first day at UT our Professors laid down the law; 1)you may only use Fus7a in class, and if you know how to say it in your dialect, so what; we do not tolerate dialects in our department. 2)When you cross the thresh hold of the department, you are only allowed to speak Fus7a, and we don’t care how long it takes for you to make us understand you or for you to understand us: NO exceptions 3)same applies in computer lab, even if you brought your sister who isn’t a student and can’'t understand a thing; she will have to wait to ask for a cup of water.
I absolutely endorse the immersion system they use. There are about six Universities in the US with serious Arabic departments, and of them UT is famous for producing graduates who can SPEAK. The others try to make things easier on the students, so they allow English for questions and sometimes explain things that way. They wind up with graduates who can read, write, translate, and perhaps understand a a bit, but they are not able, by and large, to speak.
Now, let me make it clear, in first and second year, the books had English explanations for the Arabic vocab. and grammar, but third and up were all with real sources from the Arabic world.
And that’s my two cents’ worth…
As you explain it, it’s really hard with Arabic in the States. But it’s not impossible to keep the mother language in a foreign country. There are places in Germany you can get around without any German knowledge just with Turkish. Here in the area are so many Turkish people there is even teached at school. One day in University I heard a girl talking about her language learning process she learnt Kurdish in Turkey came as a little girl to Germany learnt in Germany on the streets Turkish (NOT German!!!) when she came to school she had to learn German (what she learnt very good as I could tell from her speaking) later in school she learn more languages English and I’m not sure French or Spanish or both and know she has to learn Arabic at University. She still speaks Kurdish but it got dominated by Turkish.
ahhh, d’accord, i will go look for it
There are places in the US where German is the main language, like the Pennsylvania Dutch, and there are neighborhoods in NYC which are entirely Chinese, German, Spanish…you name it. There are a lot of people in the SW states who get by on Spanish alone, and there are many people even where we live who are manual laborers and speak only Spanish. I think in Michigan, where the largest concentration of Arabs in the US lives, there are areas where all you need is Arabic to get by. But those are enclaves, and those people have a use for the language in getting along in the outside world. I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong.
Sure if you got out of those areas you have to speak German, but there are a lot of Turkish women that don’t go out of them and they don’t speak a word German and live in Germany for ages.