Merde! Merde! Et double merde! Am I permitted to say 'merde' on this blog? Les idiomes: au diable!
Ah, that felt good. A fine anti-venom for idiom poisoning. We use idioms constantly in English. Just yesterday I ran into the hazards of trying to transport English idioms to French. I was responding to Denis' (my French pen-pal) email and used the expression 'to have one's hands full.' Naturally, he wrote back and said he'd never heard of 'avoir les mains pleins.' When I explained that the expression means something like 'to have a very onerous task at hand,' it occurred to me that there probably is no equivalent for 'at hand' in French. All these hands had to go and were in no way handy. I finally gave him the expression in an example: 'Denis really has his hands full trying to teach Guillaume how to speak French.' He got it and suggested to me that the expression 'les mains pleins' in French means that one is filthy rich. He probably thought I was after his money. Idioms: Merde!
I've concluded that the safest thing to do is not to use idioms until a certain amount of fluency arrives. Even using valid French idioms you learn from textbooks is iffy, because often they are not appropriate in certain social situations. Still, it would definitely be worthwhile to learn a lot of them, so that when you hear a native speaker use them, you'll understand.
In spite of the frustration, it's experiences like the one above that verifies that writing native speakers, though not nearly as effective as speaking to them face-to-face, is probably the next best thing. Denis not only corrects grammar mistakes, but suggests 'Frenchier' ways of saying things.
The next thing I need to work on is understanding spoken French. I suppose it's just my imagination, but it seems to me that in every language, when we speak, we get lazy and our thoughts are coming faster than our mouths can move. Thus, garbling and mumbling rule. I'm sure it's just my imagination, but it seems to me that the French are number one in the mumble category. Part of it is that they are so keen on elision and chop off entire word endings at the drop of a hat (Uh oh, another idiom. Merde!). Mon ami, Thalia has confirmed this by comparing his conversational voice to his more formal teaching voice. So, not only do I have to worry about tu'ing and vous'ing, I also have to learn both conversational French and hoity-toity French. !%$@!!!. Yikes!
The problem with trying to avoid idioms in our native language is that we take them for granted--and rarely notice we are using an idiom, so legion are they. In Korea, I regularly had to remind myself to avoid the expression "for good" (such as in 'Is that store closing for good?"). Many (most?) idioms are indeed strange if we stop to think about them.
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