A big part of our language learning is vocabulary. If you don’t know vocabulary, you can’t speak. So needless to say, we spend a great deal of time just trying to memorize words with their definition and gender (oh the joys of a language with genders – but that’s for another post). But sometimes just knowing the definition of words does not mean we understand a sentence or phrase, and even Google Translate doesn’t know the meaning. Every language has them – those idiomatic expressions.  Lately, we’ve learned a handful of French expressions and wanted to share a few with you. We’ve found a few of them to be quite humorous.

One of my favorite things in this world is cotton candy. I love it and basically anything cotton candy flavored. But, have you ever thought about its name? It’s not really made out of cotton — it just looks like cotton. In French, cotton candy is called barbe à papa or the beard of daddy.  I guess cotton candy reminds the French of a fluffy, white Santa Claus type of beard. The day after we learned this in class, I saw a cotton candy maker at our local grocery store.

Another expression we learned is prendre de la brioche. A brioche is a common roll or loaf of bread made in France. As you can see in the picture below, Brioche is a fluffy bread that kind of spills over at the top. If a person prendre de la brioche, they are developing a paunch or a pot belly, so be careful using this expression!

Have you ever said, “It’s all Greek to me!”  To express that sentiment in France, they say, “C’est du chinois.” meaning, “This is Chinese!” I guess Chinese is more confusing than Greek to the French.

When we want to express that something was easy, we say that it was a piece of cake. To express the simplicity of something, the French say that they can do it avec les doigts dans le nez. In other words, it’s so easy that they can do it with their fingers in their nose!

How would you reply if somebody told you they had a fat morning? Well, if you overhear a French person using the phrase faire la grasse matinée, he’s simply saying that he slept in that morning.

Lastly, it could be said that I (and Jeremy) parle français comme une vache espagnole. Literally that means we speak French like a Spanish cow, or to use an English expression we slaughter the French language!

Hope you enjoyed learning some French. We appreciate your prayers as we attempt to learn the French language, idioms and all!

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