@Louvelune Yeah, but it's not an accurate translation? It's like saying "c'est trop froid ici" translates to "I need you to shut that window". Sure the implication is there, but that's not the thing that was said.

@Murkrow But they're idioms, they *can't* be the literal translation of each other... ^^°

There is no "the early bird..." phrase in French, but "Le monde appartient..." is a well-known old saying, not a regular sentence.

@Murkrow It's like "it's raining cats and dogs!" => the french version says "Il pleut des cordes!"

But you can't translate that as "it's raining ropes", it doesn't make sense...

You COULD say "it's raining hard", but then you wouldn't be using an idiom, and that's the point of this lesson. :<

@Louvelune so why not teach the French idiom as a thing on its own, instead of making false equations? Why not teach me "The world belongs to those who rise early" and "it's raining in ropes" with a footnote saying (this means early risers do well) and (this means it's raining extremely hard", instead of me looking at "cordes" and going "why on earth do the French have one word for "catsanddogs"?

@Louvelune Some translations it has given so far:
"save what you can!" = "run for your life!"
"far from the eyes, far from the heart" = "out of sight, out of mind" (extremely useful when a french person tells you to call an ambulance because they're having mind palpitations)
"little by little, the bird makes a nest" = "every little helps"

these aren't accurate or helpful, as you can't break the phrase down into words and instead have to memorise the entire sentence instead of learning how to construct it. If I get as far as "little by little, the bird makes a...uh..." and neither "bird", "nest" or a second "little" are available, I can't make a stab at it.

@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 No I totally understand what you mean, and you are absolutely right, but I think this is 2 different things here:
— On one part, you need, as you said, lots of building blocks to be able to make sentences, of course
— But on another part, there are also things that *cannot* be separated in blocks, because then they stop making sense, and they are also important to learn to understand the language

I don’t know your level in French or anything, but maybe the issue here is that the idiom segment should come later, when you know more words to be more comfortable with it?
(Don’t know how duolingo handles it either or how soon idioms come up)

@Shalena as soon as you do the first five modules and spend twenty owl-monies on it.

I just got too into it and frustrated that the two bonus modules aren't as well-taught as the rest - I'm sure by the time I've got further I'll be able to pick them apart better, and it seems to be working for most other people since I've not seen anybody else getting tetchy about it.

@Murkrow Yeah, that sounds way early, I can see why you’d be put off by it :/

@Shalena @Murkrow i agree, its not useful to try to translate one idiom to another - more useful to be told the literal meaning and the idiomatic meaning

@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.

@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