expressions
"The youngster and he were great friends. The old chap taught him a great deal, mind you; and they say he had a great wish for him."
What is the point of mind you here, grammatically? What is this called in grammar? Why may it get set off by a comma?
That's a really nice idiom, I wish we had something similar. I guess we could all agree to start using it, maybe it would catch on!
As far as I know there is no direct equivalent in English.
The two closest I can think of are:
A person who is on holiday somewhere nice might say to a friend 'I wish you were here' although it's a bit of a cliché, often thought of as a nothing phrase to write on a post card
On seeing a friend after an event you might say something like
"we missed you at the party last night"
But neither really captures the sentiment of your Persian idiom I think.
I shall be a great deal too far off to trouble myself about you.
Translation, chunk by chunk:
[ I shall be ] [ a great deal ] [ too far off ] [ to trouble myself about you. ]
= [ I will be ] [ very ] [ too far away from you ] [ to do anything about you. ]
~ "I will be too very far away from you to do anything about you, my feet."
A great deal is a set phrase, meaning: "a large amount or quantity of something".
Why did Alice say so?
Because she was stretched out, like a telescope (see the image below), by the power of the cake after eating a cake in the previous chapter. (The sentence in question is from the first paragraph of chapter II of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.)
Best Answer
It is a conversational ploy, drawing attention to a remark. Sometimes it could be paraphrased "but don't get me wrong" (that is, don't misconstrue what I've just said a second or two ago).
P.S. The punctuation attempts to reflect the structural role of phrases and clauses. "Mind you" is an interjection, and thus, in speech, it would be subtly isolated from the clause that precedes it by a syntactic pause and it would also be delivered with a shift in intonation.