There are thousands of idioms in the English language. Idioms are often present in the books we read, the shows we watch, and in everyday conversations.
In this episode, we’ll look into the different types of idioms, how to learn them effectively and ask ourselves whether idioms really matter.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about one of my least favourite subjects.
[00:00:27] Idioms.
[00:00:29] As you may well know, there are thousands of idioms in English. You might have heard a teacher telling you that you need to learn as many idioms as possible, you might have heard another one telling you that idioms don’t matter in the slightest.
[00:00:44] And in this episode we are going to look at both sides or the argument, but we’re not only going to be talking about my opinion, or the opinion of someone else.
[00:00:55] We are going to look at different types of idioms. I'll give you my proposal for a new way of thinking about them, including how to learn them effectively, and perhaps, just perhaps, we’ll be able to answer the question for good of whether idioms really matter.
[00:01:13] OK then, idioms.
[00:01:18] A few weeks ago I was sitting with some friends having dinner. Most of these friends are involved in some way with learning English, with ESL - they run English schools, help people to find places to learn English, or run activities for English learners.
[00:01:37] One friend brought along a colleague of his, someone who I had never met before.
[00:01:44] His name was Kris, and he was from Poland. I was immediately struck by his accent. Not only because he had almost perfect pronunciation, but because he spoke like an upper-class English gentleman and used incredibly advanced vocabulary.
[00:02:03] It turned out that he had spent quite some time studying in English-speaking countries, and he clearly had an excellent ear, he listened very carefully to the sounds of language.
[00:02:17] Now, why am I mentioning him?
[00:02:20] Well, we were talking about language, and in particular, idioms.
[00:02:26] A couple of the Spanish members of the group joked about the expression “it’s raining cats and dogs”, meaning that it’s raining heavily.
[00:02:36] One turned to me and said, “you say that in English, right?”
[00:02:40] And my response was, well, yes it is an English idiom, but I can honestly say that I can’t remember a single time that I have ever heard any native speaker saying it in conversation with another native speaker.
[00:02:57] It always comes up in textbooks and is used by teachers, especially non-native teachers, because it’s a funny, visual expression.
[00:03:08] If you follow English teachers on Instagram or TikTok, you will probably find lots of them telling you about this idiom, perhaps with funny pictures of cats and dogs in the background.
[00:03:20] It lends itself naturally, you could say, to social media.
[00:03:25] But do people actually use it in native conversation? If you were in a pub in Manchester, would you overhear one person saying to the other “oh, it’s really raining cats and dogs at the moment”?
[00:03:40] In my opinion, no, never or at least very rarely.
[00:03:47] Clearly, with almost half a billion native English speakers, and even 70 million or so native English speakers in Britain, we have to generalise somewhat here, but here is what I said.
[00:04:01] I said that I thought native English speakers used far fewer idioms than most non-native speakers thought, and one of the main advantages of idioms seems to be for English schools to sell courses.
[00:04:16] The conversation went on, and in fact, the Polish guy I mentioned earlier disagreed with me. In his experience, English speakers do use a lot of idioms and idiomatic language in day-to-day speech.
[00:04:31] So, who was right?
[00:04:34] Me, a native English speaker, and someone who spends most of their day thinking about English and language learning?
[00:04:42] Or Kris, a Polish guy who was clearly very intelligent, had an excellent ear and spoke very good English, but was not a native speaker?
[00:04:53] It turns out that we both were, sort of, and I’ll explain why in a minute.
[00:04:59] To do this, let me take you on a little exploration, a journey through the world of idioms in English, so we can try to answer the question of whether British people, and native English speakers, actually use idioms.
[00:05:15] First, I think it’s helpful to think about the different types of idiomatic language.
[00:05:21] There are several different ways of categorising idioms, but what I want to start with is one I found on the Grammarly website, which I think is one useful way of thinking about it.
[00:05:33] So, according to Grammarly, there are four different types of idioms.
[00:05:39] Firstly, there are “pure idioms”.
[00:05:43] A pure idiom is an expression that has a completely different meaning to the words in the expression.
[00:05:51] For example, “it’s raining cats and dogs” doesn’t literally mean that there are cats and dogs coming down from the sky, it means it’s raining a lot.
[00:06:01] You could even argue that “it’s raining cats and dogs” isn’t a pure idiom, because you can probably guess what it means from the “raining” part.
[00:06:12] It’s what one linguist, a professor called Sam Glucksberg, called a “transparent” idiom, meaning you can kind of guess its meaning.
[00:06:22] A completely “pure” idiom, or what Professor Glucksberg would call an “opaque” idiom, might be something like “under the weather”. If you don’t know that expression, can you guess what it means? No, you can’t, not without context at least.
[00:06:40] In case you didn’t know, it means that you're feeling ill, you're feeling unwell.
[00:06:45] So, that’s a “pure idiom”.
[00:06:48] The second type of idiom is something called a binomial idiom, which is an idiom formed of two words, normally joined together by a preposition like “and” or “or”.
[00:07:01] Can you think of one?
[00:07:03] If you managed to think of one, well done.
[00:07:06] Examples of binomial idioms would be things like “like chalk and cheese”, meaning two very different things, so you might say, “Oh, we’re like chalk and cheese, but we need to work together on this project”.
[00:07:20] Or “fair and square”, meaning completely fair, according to the rules.
[00:07:26] So, that’s a binomial idiom.
[00:07:30] The third type is something called a “partial idiom”, which is an expression that is left unfinished, because a native speaker would know how it ends.
[00:07:42] For example, if you had some bad news but something good happened at the end, someone might say “every cloud”.
[00:07:52] That probably sounds very strange if you didn’t know what they were talking about, but “every cloud” is the first part of the idiom “every cloud has a silver lining”, meaning that good things come from bad things.
[00:08:06] Or another more classic example might be “when in Rome”, which is the first part of the expression “when in Rome, do as the Romans do”, meaning that you should try to respect new cultures and try new things when you're in new places.
[00:08:23] So, that’s a partial idiom.
[00:08:26] And then the final type is something called a “Prepositional idiom”, which is actually very similar to a phrasal verb.
[00:08:35] A prepositional idiom is, as the name suggests, a word with a preposition at the end, which creates a slightly different expression, much like a phrasal verb.
[00:08:47] For example, “step up” means to put yourself forward for a particular position. You could also put “step up” in the “partial idiom” category, as some people would use it as a shortened version of “step up to the plate”, which means to put yourself forward for a particular position, or to take action when something is particularly difficult.
[00:09:11] And there are a few more categories that some people would include in the category of “idioms”, like cliches, euphemisms and proverbs, but we aren’t going to speak about those today.
[00:09:24] As you can see, these are not always exact categories, and there is an overlap between them.
[00:09:31] And I’d also say that these categories don’t actually matter - most native speakers would have no idea about what category an idiom is in and you shouldn’t waste a minute of your precious time worrying about such unimportant things.
[00:09:48] In fact, the only reason I told you these categories was to demonstrate that they don’t actually matter, so I can give you a more sensible way of thinking about idioms.
[00:09:59] So, let’s get back to the matter at hand.
[00:10:02] Of all of the idioms in English, 25,000 by some counts, which matter and which don’t?
[00:10:09] Cleary, the ones that matter are the ones that people actually use. But how do you figure that out?
[00:10:16] Well, let me answer this question in a roundabout way.
[00:10:21] For most native speakers, deciding to use an idiom isn’t an active decision. If they use an idiomatic expression, it’s normally because it's simply the easiest and most convenient way to express meaning.
[00:10:38] To give you an example, let me go back to one of the idioms from earlier, “fair and square”.
[00:10:46] This, at least in British English, is a very common way of expressing what the idiom means, that a game or competition was played fairly and according to the rules.
[00:10:58] For example, you might hear someone saying “did you see the match last night? It was really close, and Arsenal had three penalties, but in the end Chelsea won fair and square”.
[00:11:11] If you swapped “fair and square” for the literal meaning of the idiom, saying “ but in the end Chelsea won fairly”, or even “Chelsea won fairly and according to the rules of the game”, it would sound really weird and unnatural.
[00:11:27] In this case, a native speaker would use the idiomatic way of saying it because that is the more natural way. They aren’t thinking “oh, I’ll use an idiom here”, an idiom is subconsciously used because it is the easiest way of saying this.
[00:11:46] So, let me propose a new way to think about categories of idioms, a way that I think is more helpful to anyone learning English as a second language.
[00:11:57] And this categorisation is easy, and not only because there are only two categories.
[00:12:04] In the first category there are idioms that are so frequently in use, and are so much more natural than the literal term, that native speakers wouldn’t think twice about them.
[00:12:17] In fact, I used an idiom there. Did you see it?
[00:12:21] I said that native speakers “wouldn’t think twice”.
[00:12:25] To not think twice about something means to not carefully consider it, for it to come naturally.
[00:12:33] And indeed, in this case, when I was thinking about what to say, I didn’t think, “oh, that's a good way to express that thought and I'll use an idiom there”, using wouldn’t think twice is the most common way of expressing that idea.
[00:12:49] So, that’s the first category.
[00:12:52] And the second category is, as you might have guessed, the idiomatic expressions that don’t come so naturally, the idioms where the literal alternatives are in wide use.
[00:13:05] I would certainly put “raining cats and dogs” in this category. I would be quite surprised if you found a native speaker using it outside of the classroom, and there are many more common alternatives that you’ll be likely to hear.
[00:13:19] It’s pouring, it’s chucking it down, it’s soaking, it’s raining heavily, or a very common but slightly rude expression would be “it’s pissing it down”.
[00:13:31] So, when thinking about idioms and idiomatic language, I would encourage you to think about two categories of idioms: the first is “useful and in-use idioms”, and the second is “less useful and not used idioms”.
[00:13:47] Now, you’re probably thinking “come on then, how do I figure out what category an idiom is in?"
[00:13:54] Good question.
[00:13:55] To this, I have good news and bad news.
[00:13:59] Let’s do the bad news first. The bad news is that there is no hard and fast rule, you should pay attention to language in context and listen to phrases that sound unfamiliar or unusual just like the one I used, “hard and fast”.
[00:14:16] If you’ve never heard that idiom before, do you know what it means? It means “fixed”, “definite”, but it’s a very common expression, perhaps even more common than saying “fixed”, especially when describing rules.
[00:14:32] So, that’s the bad news, that nobody can tell you that this idiom is category one, therefore learn it and use it, and this idiom is category two, so don’t worry about it.
[00:14:45] With so many dialects and different types of English in use, there is no rule, no “hard and fast” rule, that will apply to all versions.
[00:14:56] But here comes the good news. It’s that, in my opinion of course, this means that you can completely ignore any large lists of idioms, and please do not for the love of God buy any courses or lists of “the top 1,000 idioms you need to know in English”, or anything like that.
[00:15:16] By far the most effective way of learning idiomatic language is by learning them in context, because it’s only in context that you’ll see what idioms are actually used or not.
[00:15:29] A list of idioms for English learners is not context. A textbook is not context. And a course on idioms is not context.
[00:15:39] So, that’s the good news.
[00:15:41] Now, to bring this back to the start of the episode. If you remember, I told you about a dinner I had, and a discussion about idioms.
[00:15:52] I had said that I thought people in Britain used far fewer idioms than non-native speakers thought.
[00:16:00] Another guy at the table, a guy from Poland, said that he thought people in Britain used idioms very frequently.
[00:16:08] So, who was right?
[00:16:11] Well, I was certainly slightly wrong. As a native speaker, it’s easy to use idiomatic language without realising it's idiomatic, because you don’t think of it like an idiom; it’s simply the most common and easy way to communicate a point, so that’s the language we use.
[00:16:31] You heard me mention numerous examples of this during the episode, from “fair and square” through to “wouldn’t think twice”, these are idioms, or idiomatic expressions, that are so common that most native speakers wouldn’t even realise they’re using them.
[00:16:48] So, Kris was certainly right on that point.
[00:16:52] But the idioms that tend to be used most commonly are not always the ones that you’ll find in textbooks or courses.
[00:17:02] Why?
[00:17:03] Because they aren’t always as vivid and fun, they don’t make you laugh, like “cats and dogs”, they are just part of language, they are vocabulary.
[00:17:13] They are, in fact, used so frequently that they become more common than the literal meaning, so it’s almost forgotten that they are idiomatic in the first place.
[00:17:24] So what’s the moral of the story?
[00:17:27] Well, if you ask me, it’s to focus on learning idioms in context, through real-life English content, podcasts, newspapers, books, and so on.
[00:17:38] Not through vocabulary lists, courses, or worksheets.
[00:17:43] And here’s one final top-secret tip that I want to leave you with: if it’s raining heavily and you really want to sound like a native speaker, please, please, please, don’t say “it’s raining cats and dogs”.
[00:18:00] OK then, that is it for today's episode on idioms and idiomatic language.
[00:18:06] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that it’s given you a fresh perspective on this important but often overemphasised part of English.
[00:18:16] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:18:19] Do you agree with this categorisation of idioms?
[00:18:22] How do you approach learning idioms?
[00:18:25] Who was right? Me, Kris, or both of us?
[00:18:30] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:18:33] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:18:41] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:46] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about one of my least favourite subjects.
[00:00:27] Idioms.
[00:00:29] As you may well know, there are thousands of idioms in English. You might have heard a teacher telling you that you need to learn as many idioms as possible, you might have heard another one telling you that idioms don’t matter in the slightest.
[00:00:44] And in this episode we are going to look at both sides or the argument, but we’re not only going to be talking about my opinion, or the opinion of someone else.
[00:00:55] We are going to look at different types of idioms. I'll give you my proposal for a new way of thinking about them, including how to learn them effectively, and perhaps, just perhaps, we’ll be able to answer the question for good of whether idioms really matter.
[00:01:13] OK then, idioms.
[00:01:18] A few weeks ago I was sitting with some friends having dinner. Most of these friends are involved in some way with learning English, with ESL - they run English schools, help people to find places to learn English, or run activities for English learners.
[00:01:37] One friend brought along a colleague of his, someone who I had never met before.
[00:01:44] His name was Kris, and he was from Poland. I was immediately struck by his accent. Not only because he had almost perfect pronunciation, but because he spoke like an upper-class English gentleman and used incredibly advanced vocabulary.
[00:02:03] It turned out that he had spent quite some time studying in English-speaking countries, and he clearly had an excellent ear, he listened very carefully to the sounds of language.
[00:02:17] Now, why am I mentioning him?
[00:02:20] Well, we were talking about language, and in particular, idioms.
[00:02:26] A couple of the Spanish members of the group joked about the expression “it’s raining cats and dogs”, meaning that it’s raining heavily.
[00:02:36] One turned to me and said, “you say that in English, right?”
[00:02:40] And my response was, well, yes it is an English idiom, but I can honestly say that I can’t remember a single time that I have ever heard any native speaker saying it in conversation with another native speaker.
[00:02:57] It always comes up in textbooks and is used by teachers, especially non-native teachers, because it’s a funny, visual expression.
[00:03:08] If you follow English teachers on Instagram or TikTok, you will probably find lots of them telling you about this idiom, perhaps with funny pictures of cats and dogs in the background.
[00:03:20] It lends itself naturally, you could say, to social media.
[00:03:25] But do people actually use it in native conversation? If you were in a pub in Manchester, would you overhear one person saying to the other “oh, it’s really raining cats and dogs at the moment”?
[00:03:40] In my opinion, no, never or at least very rarely.
[00:03:47] Clearly, with almost half a billion native English speakers, and even 70 million or so native English speakers in Britain, we have to generalise somewhat here, but here is what I said.
[00:04:01] I said that I thought native English speakers used far fewer idioms than most non-native speakers thought, and one of the main advantages of idioms seems to be for English schools to sell courses.
[00:04:16] The conversation went on, and in fact, the Polish guy I mentioned earlier disagreed with me. In his experience, English speakers do use a lot of idioms and idiomatic language in day-to-day speech.
[00:04:31] So, who was right?
[00:04:34] Me, a native English speaker, and someone who spends most of their day thinking about English and language learning?
[00:04:42] Or Kris, a Polish guy who was clearly very intelligent, had an excellent ear and spoke very good English, but was not a native speaker?
[00:04:53] It turns out that we both were, sort of, and I’ll explain why in a minute.
[00:04:59] To do this, let me take you on a little exploration, a journey through the world of idioms in English, so we can try to answer the question of whether British people, and native English speakers, actually use idioms.
[00:05:15] First, I think it’s helpful to think about the different types of idiomatic language.
[00:05:21] There are several different ways of categorising idioms, but what I want to start with is one I found on the Grammarly website, which I think is one useful way of thinking about it.
[00:05:33] So, according to Grammarly, there are four different types of idioms.
[00:05:39] Firstly, there are “pure idioms”.
[00:05:43] A pure idiom is an expression that has a completely different meaning to the words in the expression.
[00:05:51] For example, “it’s raining cats and dogs” doesn’t literally mean that there are cats and dogs coming down from the sky, it means it’s raining a lot.
[00:06:01] You could even argue that “it’s raining cats and dogs” isn’t a pure idiom, because you can probably guess what it means from the “raining” part.
[00:06:12] It’s what one linguist, a professor called Sam Glucksberg, called a “transparent” idiom, meaning you can kind of guess its meaning.
[00:06:22] A completely “pure” idiom, or what Professor Glucksberg would call an “opaque” idiom, might be something like “under the weather”. If you don’t know that expression, can you guess what it means? No, you can’t, not without context at least.
[00:06:40] In case you didn’t know, it means that you're feeling ill, you're feeling unwell.
[00:06:45] So, that’s a “pure idiom”.
[00:06:48] The second type of idiom is something called a binomial idiom, which is an idiom formed of two words, normally joined together by a preposition like “and” or “or”.
[00:07:01] Can you think of one?
[00:07:03] If you managed to think of one, well done.
[00:07:06] Examples of binomial idioms would be things like “like chalk and cheese”, meaning two very different things, so you might say, “Oh, we’re like chalk and cheese, but we need to work together on this project”.
[00:07:20] Or “fair and square”, meaning completely fair, according to the rules.
[00:07:26] So, that’s a binomial idiom.
[00:07:30] The third type is something called a “partial idiom”, which is an expression that is left unfinished, because a native speaker would know how it ends.
[00:07:42] For example, if you had some bad news but something good happened at the end, someone might say “every cloud”.
[00:07:52] That probably sounds very strange if you didn’t know what they were talking about, but “every cloud” is the first part of the idiom “every cloud has a silver lining”, meaning that good things come from bad things.
[00:08:06] Or another more classic example might be “when in Rome”, which is the first part of the expression “when in Rome, do as the Romans do”, meaning that you should try to respect new cultures and try new things when you're in new places.
[00:08:23] So, that’s a partial idiom.
[00:08:26] And then the final type is something called a “Prepositional idiom”, which is actually very similar to a phrasal verb.
[00:08:35] A prepositional idiom is, as the name suggests, a word with a preposition at the end, which creates a slightly different expression, much like a phrasal verb.
[00:08:47] For example, “step up” means to put yourself forward for a particular position. You could also put “step up” in the “partial idiom” category, as some people would use it as a shortened version of “step up to the plate”, which means to put yourself forward for a particular position, or to take action when something is particularly difficult.
[00:09:11] And there are a few more categories that some people would include in the category of “idioms”, like cliches, euphemisms and proverbs, but we aren’t going to speak about those today.
[00:09:24] As you can see, these are not always exact categories, and there is an overlap between them.
[00:09:31] And I’d also say that these categories don’t actually matter - most native speakers would have no idea about what category an idiom is in and you shouldn’t waste a minute of your precious time worrying about such unimportant things.
[00:09:48] In fact, the only reason I told you these categories was to demonstrate that they don’t actually matter, so I can give you a more sensible way of thinking about idioms.
[00:09:59] So, let’s get back to the matter at hand.
[00:10:02] Of all of the idioms in English, 25,000 by some counts, which matter and which don’t?
[00:10:09] Cleary, the ones that matter are the ones that people actually use. But how do you figure that out?
[00:10:16] Well, let me answer this question in a roundabout way.
[00:10:21] For most native speakers, deciding to use an idiom isn’t an active decision. If they use an idiomatic expression, it’s normally because it's simply the easiest and most convenient way to express meaning.
[00:10:38] To give you an example, let me go back to one of the idioms from earlier, “fair and square”.
[00:10:46] This, at least in British English, is a very common way of expressing what the idiom means, that a game or competition was played fairly and according to the rules.
[00:10:58] For example, you might hear someone saying “did you see the match last night? It was really close, and Arsenal had three penalties, but in the end Chelsea won fair and square”.
[00:11:11] If you swapped “fair and square” for the literal meaning of the idiom, saying “ but in the end Chelsea won fairly”, or even “Chelsea won fairly and according to the rules of the game”, it would sound really weird and unnatural.
[00:11:27] In this case, a native speaker would use the idiomatic way of saying it because that is the more natural way. They aren’t thinking “oh, I’ll use an idiom here”, an idiom is subconsciously used because it is the easiest way of saying this.
[00:11:46] So, let me propose a new way to think about categories of idioms, a way that I think is more helpful to anyone learning English as a second language.
[00:11:57] And this categorisation is easy, and not only because there are only two categories.
[00:12:04] In the first category there are idioms that are so frequently in use, and are so much more natural than the literal term, that native speakers wouldn’t think twice about them.
[00:12:17] In fact, I used an idiom there. Did you see it?
[00:12:21] I said that native speakers “wouldn’t think twice”.
[00:12:25] To not think twice about something means to not carefully consider it, for it to come naturally.
[00:12:33] And indeed, in this case, when I was thinking about what to say, I didn’t think, “oh, that's a good way to express that thought and I'll use an idiom there”, using wouldn’t think twice is the most common way of expressing that idea.
[00:12:49] So, that’s the first category.
[00:12:52] And the second category is, as you might have guessed, the idiomatic expressions that don’t come so naturally, the idioms where the literal alternatives are in wide use.
[00:13:05] I would certainly put “raining cats and dogs” in this category. I would be quite surprised if you found a native speaker using it outside of the classroom, and there are many more common alternatives that you’ll be likely to hear.
[00:13:19] It’s pouring, it’s chucking it down, it’s soaking, it’s raining heavily, or a very common but slightly rude expression would be “it’s pissing it down”.
[00:13:31] So, when thinking about idioms and idiomatic language, I would encourage you to think about two categories of idioms: the first is “useful and in-use idioms”, and the second is “less useful and not used idioms”.
[00:13:47] Now, you’re probably thinking “come on then, how do I figure out what category an idiom is in?"
[00:13:54] Good question.
[00:13:55] To this, I have good news and bad news.
[00:13:59] Let’s do the bad news first. The bad news is that there is no hard and fast rule, you should pay attention to language in context and listen to phrases that sound unfamiliar or unusual just like the one I used, “hard and fast”.
[00:14:16] If you’ve never heard that idiom before, do you know what it means? It means “fixed”, “definite”, but it’s a very common expression, perhaps even more common than saying “fixed”, especially when describing rules.
[00:14:32] So, that’s the bad news, that nobody can tell you that this idiom is category one, therefore learn it and use it, and this idiom is category two, so don’t worry about it.
[00:14:45] With so many dialects and different types of English in use, there is no rule, no “hard and fast” rule, that will apply to all versions.
[00:14:56] But here comes the good news. It’s that, in my opinion of course, this means that you can completely ignore any large lists of idioms, and please do not for the love of God buy any courses or lists of “the top 1,000 idioms you need to know in English”, or anything like that.
[00:15:16] By far the most effective way of learning idiomatic language is by learning them in context, because it’s only in context that you’ll see what idioms are actually used or not.
[00:15:29] A list of idioms for English learners is not context. A textbook is not context. And a course on idioms is not context.
[00:15:39] So, that’s the good news.
[00:15:41] Now, to bring this back to the start of the episode. If you remember, I told you about a dinner I had, and a discussion about idioms.
[00:15:52] I had said that I thought people in Britain used far fewer idioms than non-native speakers thought.
[00:16:00] Another guy at the table, a guy from Poland, said that he thought people in Britain used idioms very frequently.
[00:16:08] So, who was right?
[00:16:11] Well, I was certainly slightly wrong. As a native speaker, it’s easy to use idiomatic language without realising it's idiomatic, because you don’t think of it like an idiom; it’s simply the most common and easy way to communicate a point, so that’s the language we use.
[00:16:31] You heard me mention numerous examples of this during the episode, from “fair and square” through to “wouldn’t think twice”, these are idioms, or idiomatic expressions, that are so common that most native speakers wouldn’t even realise they’re using them.
[00:16:48] So, Kris was certainly right on that point.
[00:16:52] But the idioms that tend to be used most commonly are not always the ones that you’ll find in textbooks or courses.
[00:17:02] Why?
[00:17:03] Because they aren’t always as vivid and fun, they don’t make you laugh, like “cats and dogs”, they are just part of language, they are vocabulary.
[00:17:13] They are, in fact, used so frequently that they become more common than the literal meaning, so it’s almost forgotten that they are idiomatic in the first place.
[00:17:24] So what’s the moral of the story?
[00:17:27] Well, if you ask me, it’s to focus on learning idioms in context, through real-life English content, podcasts, newspapers, books, and so on.
[00:17:38] Not through vocabulary lists, courses, or worksheets.
[00:17:43] And here’s one final top-secret tip that I want to leave you with: if it’s raining heavily and you really want to sound like a native speaker, please, please, please, don’t say “it’s raining cats and dogs”.
[00:18:00] OK then, that is it for today's episode on idioms and idiomatic language.
[00:18:06] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that it’s given you a fresh perspective on this important but often overemphasised part of English.
[00:18:16] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:18:19] Do you agree with this categorisation of idioms?
[00:18:22] How do you approach learning idioms?
[00:18:25] Who was right? Me, Kris, or both of us?
[00:18:30] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:18:33] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:18:41] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:46] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about one of my least favourite subjects.
[00:00:27] Idioms.
[00:00:29] As you may well know, there are thousands of idioms in English. You might have heard a teacher telling you that you need to learn as many idioms as possible, you might have heard another one telling you that idioms don’t matter in the slightest.
[00:00:44] And in this episode we are going to look at both sides or the argument, but we’re not only going to be talking about my opinion, or the opinion of someone else.
[00:00:55] We are going to look at different types of idioms. I'll give you my proposal for a new way of thinking about them, including how to learn them effectively, and perhaps, just perhaps, we’ll be able to answer the question for good of whether idioms really matter.
[00:01:13] OK then, idioms.
[00:01:18] A few weeks ago I was sitting with some friends having dinner. Most of these friends are involved in some way with learning English, with ESL - they run English schools, help people to find places to learn English, or run activities for English learners.
[00:01:37] One friend brought along a colleague of his, someone who I had never met before.
[00:01:44] His name was Kris, and he was from Poland. I was immediately struck by his accent. Not only because he had almost perfect pronunciation, but because he spoke like an upper-class English gentleman and used incredibly advanced vocabulary.
[00:02:03] It turned out that he had spent quite some time studying in English-speaking countries, and he clearly had an excellent ear, he listened very carefully to the sounds of language.
[00:02:17] Now, why am I mentioning him?
[00:02:20] Well, we were talking about language, and in particular, idioms.
[00:02:26] A couple of the Spanish members of the group joked about the expression “it’s raining cats and dogs”, meaning that it’s raining heavily.
[00:02:36] One turned to me and said, “you say that in English, right?”
[00:02:40] And my response was, well, yes it is an English idiom, but I can honestly say that I can’t remember a single time that I have ever heard any native speaker saying it in conversation with another native speaker.
[00:02:57] It always comes up in textbooks and is used by teachers, especially non-native teachers, because it’s a funny, visual expression.
[00:03:08] If you follow English teachers on Instagram or TikTok, you will probably find lots of them telling you about this idiom, perhaps with funny pictures of cats and dogs in the background.
[00:03:20] It lends itself naturally, you could say, to social media.
[00:03:25] But do people actually use it in native conversation? If you were in a pub in Manchester, would you overhear one person saying to the other “oh, it’s really raining cats and dogs at the moment”?
[00:03:40] In my opinion, no, never or at least very rarely.
[00:03:47] Clearly, with almost half a billion native English speakers, and even 70 million or so native English speakers in Britain, we have to generalise somewhat here, but here is what I said.
[00:04:01] I said that I thought native English speakers used far fewer idioms than most non-native speakers thought, and one of the main advantages of idioms seems to be for English schools to sell courses.
[00:04:16] The conversation went on, and in fact, the Polish guy I mentioned earlier disagreed with me. In his experience, English speakers do use a lot of idioms and idiomatic language in day-to-day speech.
[00:04:31] So, who was right?
[00:04:34] Me, a native English speaker, and someone who spends most of their day thinking about English and language learning?
[00:04:42] Or Kris, a Polish guy who was clearly very intelligent, had an excellent ear and spoke very good English, but was not a native speaker?
[00:04:53] It turns out that we both were, sort of, and I’ll explain why in a minute.
[00:04:59] To do this, let me take you on a little exploration, a journey through the world of idioms in English, so we can try to answer the question of whether British people, and native English speakers, actually use idioms.
[00:05:15] First, I think it’s helpful to think about the different types of idiomatic language.
[00:05:21] There are several different ways of categorising idioms, but what I want to start with is one I found on the Grammarly website, which I think is one useful way of thinking about it.
[00:05:33] So, according to Grammarly, there are four different types of idioms.
[00:05:39] Firstly, there are “pure idioms”.
[00:05:43] A pure idiom is an expression that has a completely different meaning to the words in the expression.
[00:05:51] For example, “it’s raining cats and dogs” doesn’t literally mean that there are cats and dogs coming down from the sky, it means it’s raining a lot.
[00:06:01] You could even argue that “it’s raining cats and dogs” isn’t a pure idiom, because you can probably guess what it means from the “raining” part.
[00:06:12] It’s what one linguist, a professor called Sam Glucksberg, called a “transparent” idiom, meaning you can kind of guess its meaning.
[00:06:22] A completely “pure” idiom, or what Professor Glucksberg would call an “opaque” idiom, might be something like “under the weather”. If you don’t know that expression, can you guess what it means? No, you can’t, not without context at least.
[00:06:40] In case you didn’t know, it means that you're feeling ill, you're feeling unwell.
[00:06:45] So, that’s a “pure idiom”.
[00:06:48] The second type of idiom is something called a binomial idiom, which is an idiom formed of two words, normally joined together by a preposition like “and” or “or”.
[00:07:01] Can you think of one?
[00:07:03] If you managed to think of one, well done.
[00:07:06] Examples of binomial idioms would be things like “like chalk and cheese”, meaning two very different things, so you might say, “Oh, we’re like chalk and cheese, but we need to work together on this project”.
[00:07:20] Or “fair and square”, meaning completely fair, according to the rules.
[00:07:26] So, that’s a binomial idiom.
[00:07:30] The third type is something called a “partial idiom”, which is an expression that is left unfinished, because a native speaker would know how it ends.
[00:07:42] For example, if you had some bad news but something good happened at the end, someone might say “every cloud”.
[00:07:52] That probably sounds very strange if you didn’t know what they were talking about, but “every cloud” is the first part of the idiom “every cloud has a silver lining”, meaning that good things come from bad things.
[00:08:06] Or another more classic example might be “when in Rome”, which is the first part of the expression “when in Rome, do as the Romans do”, meaning that you should try to respect new cultures and try new things when you're in new places.
[00:08:23] So, that’s a partial idiom.
[00:08:26] And then the final type is something called a “Prepositional idiom”, which is actually very similar to a phrasal verb.
[00:08:35] A prepositional idiom is, as the name suggests, a word with a preposition at the end, which creates a slightly different expression, much like a phrasal verb.
[00:08:47] For example, “step up” means to put yourself forward for a particular position. You could also put “step up” in the “partial idiom” category, as some people would use it as a shortened version of “step up to the plate”, which means to put yourself forward for a particular position, or to take action when something is particularly difficult.
[00:09:11] And there are a few more categories that some people would include in the category of “idioms”, like cliches, euphemisms and proverbs, but we aren’t going to speak about those today.
[00:09:24] As you can see, these are not always exact categories, and there is an overlap between them.
[00:09:31] And I’d also say that these categories don’t actually matter - most native speakers would have no idea about what category an idiom is in and you shouldn’t waste a minute of your precious time worrying about such unimportant things.
[00:09:48] In fact, the only reason I told you these categories was to demonstrate that they don’t actually matter, so I can give you a more sensible way of thinking about idioms.
[00:09:59] So, let’s get back to the matter at hand.
[00:10:02] Of all of the idioms in English, 25,000 by some counts, which matter and which don’t?
[00:10:09] Cleary, the ones that matter are the ones that people actually use. But how do you figure that out?
[00:10:16] Well, let me answer this question in a roundabout way.
[00:10:21] For most native speakers, deciding to use an idiom isn’t an active decision. If they use an idiomatic expression, it’s normally because it's simply the easiest and most convenient way to express meaning.
[00:10:38] To give you an example, let me go back to one of the idioms from earlier, “fair and square”.
[00:10:46] This, at least in British English, is a very common way of expressing what the idiom means, that a game or competition was played fairly and according to the rules.
[00:10:58] For example, you might hear someone saying “did you see the match last night? It was really close, and Arsenal had three penalties, but in the end Chelsea won fair and square”.
[00:11:11] If you swapped “fair and square” for the literal meaning of the idiom, saying “ but in the end Chelsea won fairly”, or even “Chelsea won fairly and according to the rules of the game”, it would sound really weird and unnatural.
[00:11:27] In this case, a native speaker would use the idiomatic way of saying it because that is the more natural way. They aren’t thinking “oh, I’ll use an idiom here”, an idiom is subconsciously used because it is the easiest way of saying this.
[00:11:46] So, let me propose a new way to think about categories of idioms, a way that I think is more helpful to anyone learning English as a second language.
[00:11:57] And this categorisation is easy, and not only because there are only two categories.
[00:12:04] In the first category there are idioms that are so frequently in use, and are so much more natural than the literal term, that native speakers wouldn’t think twice about them.
[00:12:17] In fact, I used an idiom there. Did you see it?
[00:12:21] I said that native speakers “wouldn’t think twice”.
[00:12:25] To not think twice about something means to not carefully consider it, for it to come naturally.
[00:12:33] And indeed, in this case, when I was thinking about what to say, I didn’t think, “oh, that's a good way to express that thought and I'll use an idiom there”, using wouldn’t think twice is the most common way of expressing that idea.
[00:12:49] So, that’s the first category.
[00:12:52] And the second category is, as you might have guessed, the idiomatic expressions that don’t come so naturally, the idioms where the literal alternatives are in wide use.
[00:13:05] I would certainly put “raining cats and dogs” in this category. I would be quite surprised if you found a native speaker using it outside of the classroom, and there are many more common alternatives that you’ll be likely to hear.
[00:13:19] It’s pouring, it’s chucking it down, it’s soaking, it’s raining heavily, or a very common but slightly rude expression would be “it’s pissing it down”.
[00:13:31] So, when thinking about idioms and idiomatic language, I would encourage you to think about two categories of idioms: the first is “useful and in-use idioms”, and the second is “less useful and not used idioms”.
[00:13:47] Now, you’re probably thinking “come on then, how do I figure out what category an idiom is in?"
[00:13:54] Good question.
[00:13:55] To this, I have good news and bad news.
[00:13:59] Let’s do the bad news first. The bad news is that there is no hard and fast rule, you should pay attention to language in context and listen to phrases that sound unfamiliar or unusual just like the one I used, “hard and fast”.
[00:14:16] If you’ve never heard that idiom before, do you know what it means? It means “fixed”, “definite”, but it’s a very common expression, perhaps even more common than saying “fixed”, especially when describing rules.
[00:14:32] So, that’s the bad news, that nobody can tell you that this idiom is category one, therefore learn it and use it, and this idiom is category two, so don’t worry about it.
[00:14:45] With so many dialects and different types of English in use, there is no rule, no “hard and fast” rule, that will apply to all versions.
[00:14:56] But here comes the good news. It’s that, in my opinion of course, this means that you can completely ignore any large lists of idioms, and please do not for the love of God buy any courses or lists of “the top 1,000 idioms you need to know in English”, or anything like that.
[00:15:16] By far the most effective way of learning idiomatic language is by learning them in context, because it’s only in context that you’ll see what idioms are actually used or not.
[00:15:29] A list of idioms for English learners is not context. A textbook is not context. And a course on idioms is not context.
[00:15:39] So, that’s the good news.
[00:15:41] Now, to bring this back to the start of the episode. If you remember, I told you about a dinner I had, and a discussion about idioms.
[00:15:52] I had said that I thought people in Britain used far fewer idioms than non-native speakers thought.
[00:16:00] Another guy at the table, a guy from Poland, said that he thought people in Britain used idioms very frequently.
[00:16:08] So, who was right?
[00:16:11] Well, I was certainly slightly wrong. As a native speaker, it’s easy to use idiomatic language without realising it's idiomatic, because you don’t think of it like an idiom; it’s simply the most common and easy way to communicate a point, so that’s the language we use.
[00:16:31] You heard me mention numerous examples of this during the episode, from “fair and square” through to “wouldn’t think twice”, these are idioms, or idiomatic expressions, that are so common that most native speakers wouldn’t even realise they’re using them.
[00:16:48] So, Kris was certainly right on that point.
[00:16:52] But the idioms that tend to be used most commonly are not always the ones that you’ll find in textbooks or courses.
[00:17:02] Why?
[00:17:03] Because they aren’t always as vivid and fun, they don’t make you laugh, like “cats and dogs”, they are just part of language, they are vocabulary.
[00:17:13] They are, in fact, used so frequently that they become more common than the literal meaning, so it’s almost forgotten that they are idiomatic in the first place.
[00:17:24] So what’s the moral of the story?
[00:17:27] Well, if you ask me, it’s to focus on learning idioms in context, through real-life English content, podcasts, newspapers, books, and so on.
[00:17:38] Not through vocabulary lists, courses, or worksheets.
[00:17:43] And here’s one final top-secret tip that I want to leave you with: if it’s raining heavily and you really want to sound like a native speaker, please, please, please, don’t say “it’s raining cats and dogs”.
[00:18:00] OK then, that is it for today's episode on idioms and idiomatic language.
[00:18:06] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that it’s given you a fresh perspective on this important but often overemphasised part of English.
[00:18:16] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:18:19] Do you agree with this categorisation of idioms?
[00:18:22] How do you approach learning idioms?
[00:18:25] Who was right? Me, Kris, or both of us?
[00:18:30] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:18:33] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:18:41] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:46] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
