Tag: sayings

A neon style image of a robot with a speech bubble to illustrate the idea of Swedish proverbs as language learning material

Proverbs and Language Learning : From Folk Wisdom to Classroom

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I’ve been crash-learning Swedish (well, side-stepping into it from Norwegian) more and more intensively of late. And one of the most pleasant linguistic detours I’ve made has been through the lush valleys of Swedish proverbs.

Proverbs and sayings have always been a favourite way in of mine when working on a language, and for several good reasons. Firstly, they’re short, and usually easier to remember by design so people could easily memorise and recite them. Secondly, they’re very often built around high-frequency structures (think X is like Y, better X than Y) that serve as effective language models.

Birds in a forest, a favourite trope of proverbs!

Bättre en fågel i handen än tio i skogen (Better one bird in the hand than ten in the forest)

But there’s another big pay-off to learning through proverbs that is more than the sum of their words. They pack a lot of meaning into a short space – drop them in and you’re calling to the conversation all the nuance they carry. Think of the grass is always greener… You don’t even need to mention the second, missing part of that English proverb, and it already calls to mind countless shared parables of misplaced dissatisfaction. And since they’re based on those parables and folk histories that ‘grew up’ alongside your target language, proverbs can grant us some fascinating cultural insights, too.

In short, master proverbs and you’ll sound like you really know what you’re talking about in the target language.

Finding Proverbs

For many target languages, you’ll likely be able to source some kind of proverbs compendium in a good bookshop, as they’re as much of interest to native speakers as they are to learners. When you do find a good one, compilations of sayings are the epitome of the dip-in-and-out book. I’ve picked up lots of Gaelic constructions and vocab leafing idly through Alexander Nicolson’s Gaelic Proverbs in my spare moments. It was definitely time for me to try the same with some Swedish.

Without a good Swedish bookshop to hand, though, I turned to the Internet in the meantime. A good place to start is to find out what “[your language] proverbs” is in your target language (it’s svenska ordspråk in Swedish), and see what a good search engine throws up.

Tala är silver, tiga är guld.

Tala är silver, tiga är guld (Talking is silver, silence is gold)

Local cultural institutions in particular can be rich sources of articles on folk wisdom like proverbs. There are some lovely sites and articles that introduce the wise words of svenska in digestible chunks. My handful of Swedish favourites below are each written for a native speaker audience. They all give potted backgrounds on the proverbs in Swedish, making for some great extra reading practice.

INSTITUTET FÖR SPRÅK OCH FOLKMINNEN

This folk-minded article is a wonderful introduction to Swedish proverbs, offering not only examples, but also exploring the characteristics of proverbs and what makes them ‘stick’. There’s a special section on sayings from the Gothenburg area too, which adds a nice local flavour.

TIDNINGEN LAND

This article from the Land publication offers 19 common Swedish proverbs in handy list format. Even more handily, it paraphrases each in order to explain their meaning. Great for working out what some of the more archaic words mean without reaching for the Swedish-English dictionary!

NORDISKA MUSEET

Nordiska Museet offers another well-curated list, with not only paraphrasing, but etymological information on the more difficult or outdated words.

The Proverbial AI

You can also tap the vast training banks of AI platforms for proverbial nuggets. Granted, the knowledge of LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude may not be complete – training data is only a subset of material available online – but AI does offer the advantage of activity creation with the material.

Try this prompt for starters:

Create a Swedish proverbs activity to help me practise my Swedish.
Choose five well-known proverbs, and replace a key word in each with a gap. I must choose the correct word for the gap from four alternatives in each case. Make some of the alternatives humorous! Add an answer key at the end of this quiz along with brief explanations of each proverb.

I managed to get some really fun quizzes out of this. Well worth playing around with for self-learning mini-worksheets!

A Swedish proverbs activity created by ChatGPT

A Swedish proverbs activity created by ChatGPT-4

AI platforms can also play a role as ‘proverb visualisers’, which is how I generated the images in this article. Proverbs can often employ some quite unusual imagery; letting picture generators loose on those can be a fantastic way to make them more memorable!

However you come across target language sayings and proverbs, you can learn a lot from these little chunks of wisdom. Do you have a favourite saying in any of the languages you’re studying? Let us know in the comments!

A cheeky monkey - a staple of humour!

Humour and language learning: fuel your vocab with idioms!

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Humour can be a great aide memoire when learning foreign languages. For one thing, humour increases the salience – or importance – our brains attach to learning material. We’ve all experienced how it’s easier to learn something that isn’t boring!

What’s more, many research studies have repeatedly demonstrated how humorous material can enhance learning. It can boost recall – it’s one of the reasons the keyword system of vocabulary learning can be so effective. It can reduce anxiety in an education setting. And some, like this one, even suggest that the dodgier, morerisqué the content, the better the effect!

So, where to look for humour in your target language? Perhaps the best place to start is the quirky turns of phrase, aphorisms and idioms, that are very particular to a given tongue. Just take English, for example: it’s not hard to smirk at such gems as . One reason language is so full of them is that our brains latch onto the entertaining imagery in them, operating along these lines of salience and ensuring that they’re easy to recall later on. It’s the same reason that the wild, fantastical stories of oral literary traditions were passed down the generations by memory for centuries before being written down.

Hunting for humour

The easiest way to source these is to simply Google for “funny idioms in French / German / Spanish / your language”. Humour is popular, and there’s therefore no shortage of collections of funny sayings for language learners!

Once found, the best way to integrate them into your learning is to pick out a few of your favourites, and add them to your own personal word lists. These could be offline, in a notebook, or in your favourite vocab / drill program like Anki Flashcards.

However, since idioms lend themselves to some hilarious, imaginative visuals, it’s a good idea to harness that in your learning, too. As a starting point, there’s a superb book of Castilian sayings for learners, which illustrates each saying with a simple but funny cartoon: 101 Spanish Idioms. Although the hard work is done for you here, it’s even more fun and satisfying to create your own illustrations, especially if you like to doodle. For simple scribbles, for example, I like to use to use Notability or Procreate for iOS. Find a saying, create a sketch, then export it to use in flashcards, or add to a drilling program like Anki.

More vocab for your buck

But don’t just learn the phrase – break it down, and mine it for vocab. Take the Spanish phrase tomar el pelo (to pull someone’s leg). It literally means ‘to take the hair’ (weird, right?). But from that phrase, you get two extra words for your vocab list, ‘to take’ and ‘hair’, both of which are pretty useful. So add them as separate items to your word bank, and you get multiple hits for the price of one.

Humour in idioms: some favourites

Without further ado, here are a few of my own favourite humorous idioms in a range of languages. As you’ll see, many of them are based on animals or food – strangely recurrent themes when researching the world of weird idioms!

English 🇬🇧

mad as a box of frogs 🐸🐸🐸
completely crazy, eccentric

French 🇫🇷

avoir le cafard
to have the cockroach 🐞 (I know that’s a ladybird – there’s no cockroach emoticon yet!)
to be depressed

Dutch 🇳🇱

een appeltje met iemand te schillen hebben
To have a little apple to peel with someone 🍏
To have a bone to pick with someone

The English translation is just as odd and quirky as the Dutch!

Finnish 🇫🇮

juosta pää kolmantena jalkana
to run with the head as a third leg 🏃🏽
to be in a mad rush

Just an aside: it was tricky to find Finnish idioms that didn’t contain some very dodgy language – this was by far the cleanest in my little ‘net search!

German 🇩🇪

Schwein haben
to have pig 🐷
to have good luck

Icelandic 🇮🇸

ekki upp í nös á ketti
not enough to fill a cat’s nose 🐱
very little

Italian 🇮🇹

trattare a pesci in faccia
To treat with fish in the face 🐟
To disrespect

Norwegian 🇳🇴

født bak en brunost
born behind a brown cheese
a bit dim

Some useful general vocab here, plus a lovely nugget of Norwegian culinary culture!

Polish 🇲🇨

myśleć o niebieskich migdałach
to think of blue almonds
to daydream

dzielić skórę na niedźwiedziu
to divide the skin while it’s still on the bear 🐻
to count your chickens before they’ve hatched

Another one where the English translation is just as animalistic and odd!

Russian 🇷🇺

делать из мухи слона (dyelat’ iz mukhi slona)
to make an elephant from a fly 🐘
to make mountains out of molehills

…another pair of translations which are as colourful and zoological as each other!

Spanish 🇪🇸

arrimar el ascua a su sardina 🔥 🐟
to bring the coals closer to one’s sardine
to look out for number one, be selfish

Swedish 🇸🇪

nära skjuter ingen hare
near shot, no rabbit 🐰
close but no cigar

Do you have more personal favourites from your own language explorations? Please share – more laughs are always a welcome thing!