Okay idioms are really defeating me, doesn’t this say "the world belongs to those who rise early"? https://witches.town/media/JbNpjbjcWyHYIMLNFYU
@Murkrow It’s the literal translation, but idioms rarely translate literally; different images are used in different languages to convey the same idea.
If you say « The world belongs to those who rise early » to an English speaker, they will probably find it weird, and same goes the other way around if you translate literally the English idiom to French, so you need to learn each version rather than learn to translate them
(hoping that explanation makes sense…)
@Shalena okay maybe this is a me problem then. I'm learning as a foreigner and my goal is to get lots of building blocks so I can construct new sentences as needed instead of repeating things, so if I need to say "oh look! A bird's nest" or "aaaa, there is a bird in my bedroom!". Teaching the meaning of each word is more helpful to me personally than one long block of 'theearlybirdcatchestheworm' or 'littlebylittlethebirdmakesanest' but I guess that's just me since nobody else seems to have a problem with it.
@Murkrow @candle Though I do agree that it’d be way more useful and relevant to learn these kind of things once you already *know* the words in the idioms and such, because otherwise it makes two different things to learn at the same time, which is stupid.
So in my opinion, the problem isn’t so much about how the lesson is made, than when it shows up. To me, it should come way later, when you don’t have to worry about vocabulary
@candle @Murkrow Well I don’t know, literal meaning can be pretty useless (Like « donner sa langue au chat » means « to give one’s tongue to the cat »… okay, great, soo?). Learning a language isn’t just learning to literally translate each words, because languages don’t work like that, they have different constructions that carry different meanings (hence why translating, and even more so translating poetry for example, is so hard!)
What you want to know is that, when you want to say « it’s raining cats and dogs », you’re gonna have to say « il pleut des cordes », neither actually make sense literally.