Customer Reviews

What Did You Say? What Do You Mean?: An Illustrated Guide to Understanding Metaphors

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book was perfect for my 9 yo daughter. She has NLD and is often confused by language, facial expression, or hidden meanings. We had a lot of fun guessing the answers (she got them wrong every time!) and then reading the correct meaning. Within an hour she had picked a lyric out of a song and understood it for the first time ("coming out of my shell"). We are thrilled with this book!

What Did You Say? What Do You Mean?: An Illustrated Guide to Understanding Metaphors is such a wonderful tool to enhance your knowledge on the backgrounds and/or reasons of each idiom. The author quite specifically illustrated the literal meanings, the real meanings, i.e, implications, reasons of the meanings, and examples. The book is not only for child and adult Aspies, but also neurotypical people. Once you catch what idioms really mean, you will be sure to get hooked on them.
This book certainly is more comprehensible than An Asperger Dictionary of Everyday Expressions(2nd Edition), although the latter contains more information than the former. Especially for Aspies or Non-native speakers of English, I would like to recommend the former to strengthen your vocabulary building more efficiently! I feel it might be hard to image the meanings of idioms written on the latter, because it seems to lack specific information. Therefore, I would like to ask you to start with this book.
After all, this dictionary is the real reinforcement of smoother communications in your daily life! You should keep in mind that overuse of the idioms and metaphors is likely to confuse listeners or readers, though.

This book helps a child with Aspergers unravel the mysteries of colloquial meatphors -- that is the great idea. However, it was written in the United Kingdom, which means that sometimes the explanations are confusing also (what is a queue, Mom???)-- that takes away from its effectiveness and makes for frustration. There are also a couple of publishing goofs -- wrong explanation on the page -- no excuse for that. I actually whited them out and moved the words over. Like I said -- great idea -- upbeat and useful -- but it should be noted that it is not US English.

For people with autism/Asperger's, this book is the book to have in understanding colloquialisms, idioms and metaphors. Instead of relying on neurotypical (NT) counterparts to interpret and translate these phrases, just keep this book handy. It's the ideal tool to have when learning the language of the NT world.

Have teenager with ASD/Asberger syndrome, this book is just what we needed!

In response to my explanation of the idiom "get your skates on"

"There's some strange things those normal people make up"

Absolutely, so that gives you the heads up, there's no beating about the bush here, it's all from the horses' mouth.... (am I gonna get in hot water for this), let me just chew the cud for a while.