Purpose

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to recognize and use common French idiomatic expressions that do not translate literally from English.

Lesson Explanation

Genuine fluency requires knowing expressions that cannot be understood by translating word-for-word. Common idioms built on already-familiar verbs:

Avoir envie de + infinitive — to feel like doing something (literally "to have desire of"): J'ai envie de danser. (I feel like dancing.)
Ça me manque — I miss it (literally "that lacks to me," an inverted structure like piacere from an earlier Gabal course): Tu me manques. (I miss you — literally "you are lacking to me.")
Coûter les yeux de la tête — to be very expensive (literally "to cost the eyes from the head," genuinely parallel to the Italian idiom costare un occhio della testa from an earlier Gabal course).
Poser un lapin — to stand someone up (literally "to place a rabbit" — a genuinely opaque idiom with no logical connection to its meaning).
Il pleut des cordes — it's raining heavily (literally "it's raining ropes").

A genuinely common structure worth knowing beyond single idioms: avoir combines with several nouns where English uses “to be” plus an adjective, mirroring the pattern already seen in the Spanish and Italian courses:

avoir faim — to be hungry (literally "to have hunger")
avoir soif — to be thirsty
avoir peur — to be afraid
avoir raison — to be right

Saying “Je suis faim” instead of “J’ai faim” is a genuinely common learner error — this pattern is worth memorizing as a set, exactly as with the Spanish/Italian equivalents covered earlier.

Practice Questions