Language cuts both ways. On the one hand, language is an open system and allows its users to be creative and to produce as many novel expressions as wished, as long as they make sense. That is, it is not necessary to have ever heard a particular phrase or sentence before in one’s life in order to be able to produce it at some later point in time. For example, when you would like to report about a particular individual and unique experience you have made you cannot simply look up these sentences in a textbook. All you can do is to look for the right words and arrange them in a way that they make sense. In order to do so you need to know, at least, some basic grammar, which is, first of all, word order. Other subtleties of language like case ending of nouns and the conjugation of verbs are preliminary of secondary importance. On the other hand, a language can restrict you in how you can arrange several words in order to express a more complex meaning. The best example for that are a language’s idiomatic expressions.

Idioms are fixed phrases whose meaning cannot be inferred from the meanings of the individual words. They tend to be frozen in form and thus do not readily enter into other combinations or allow the word order to change. For example, a German expression for being lucky is Schwein haben, which literally means “to have pig”. As you can see, idiomatic expressions are speech forms that cannot be understood by literal translation. You must learn and memorize them along with their meanings.

Idioms are so special because they are usually culturally influenced. For example, the German expression seinen Senf dazu geben literally means “to give his mustard to something” but it means “to give one’s opinion”. The English equivalent for that is the idiomatic expression “to add one’s two cents”. Some German idiomatic expression are related to English, while others are not.

And what German idioms do you know?