Chances are you will never ever encounter a single idiom in your academic textbooks. Here you have nothing to worry about. That said, the problems of understanding your professor can start as early as when he or she says, "This semester your hands will be full, and I want to make sure that no one here cuts corners. " Your puzzlement might continue when the professor apologizes to your for accidentally"putting you on the spot", and you might get even more confused when, towards the end of the class, your instructor will say, "Let's wrap it up".
Moreover, I can guarantee that as long as you daily study or work with native English speakers, you will keep learning idioms after idioms and will never stop wondering about the wealth of the American idiomatic language. Thus, for instance, you will here them say that someone is totally up their alley, that they want to set the record straight, and that particular question was outside their wheelhouse.
At times you might end up feeling like the character in the cartoon
Symphony in Slang.
That is why studying English idioms should go hand in hand (haha) with practicing academic vocabulary, which you can find
here,
here,
here, and
here.
The TOEFL Idioms book is my favorite. I often have my students practice some of the most frequently used idioms from it and then review them with our old friend Quizlet.
Here you can find dozens of practice sets of all the taught idioms together with their definitions from this book. Enjoy!
Have fun learning new vocabulary and remember: the more you expose yourself to the target vocabulary, the better you will retain (AKA "remember") these words). Thus, for instance, you can upload any vocabulary of your choice at a
bingo card generator and compete with your classmates or friends. You will see how many new words you'll be able to remember in no time!
To give you an example, I've uploaded 20 idioms from the above mentioned book so that you can have 10 ready-made bingo cards, enough for an entire language class. I usually use them together with paper flash cards, on which both the idioms and their definitions are given. One student draws one flash card with a definition, and the others are to find out if the target word is given on their bingo cards. (By the way, you can print out such flash cards from Quizlet in no time by hitting
Print and then
Index Card.)
You can find the bingo cards by simply clicking
here.
All the best,
Yulia
