Purpose

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to correctly use six common German idioms in natural conversation.

Lesson Explanation

An idiom’s meaning is genuinely different from what its individual words literally suggest:

Ich habe die Nase voll.        — I'm fed up (literally "I have the nose full")
Das ist mir Wurst.              — I don't care (literally "that is sausage to me")
Da liegt der Hase im Pfeffer.   — that's the real problem (literally "there lies the rabbit in the pepper")
Tomaten auf den Augen haben     — to not notice something obvious (literally "to have tomatoes on the eyes")
ins Gras beißen                 — to die (literally "to bite into the grass")
Schwein haben                   — to be lucky (literally "to have pig")

A genuinely useful signal that a phrase is an idiom: it doesn’t make literal sense in context — someone saying they “have the nose full” isn’t describing their actual nose, which is exactly the mismatch that signals a fixed idiomatic phrase.

Practice Questions