Learning idioms is an impossible task. There are thousands of them in English and you have to learn every single one!

Just kidding! There may be as many as 25,000 idioms in English and I doubt that I use more than a few hundred on a regular basis. But, as a native speaker of English, I am able to understand most idioms when I hear them because I can guess the approximate meaning from the context.

As an English learner, you won’t be able to guess the meaning from the context as quickly or as easily as me,  but you’re probably much better at it than you might think.

Let’s have a try:

Jack: I’m starving. I could eat a horse.

Mary: There’s some pizza from last night in the fridge.

That’s right – we use it to say that somebody is starving (very hungry).

What can make learning idioms difficult is that the words used separately often have a basic and common meaning, but are used to refer to something else when used in an idiom.

Words can have two or more meanings. One meaning (the common and basic one) is literal and the other (used as a metaphor or to symbolize something else) is the figurative meaning.

Idioms are fixed expressions which have a figurative meaning. Knowing the individual words may not help you understand the idiom.

The problem is that many English teachers will sympathise with your struggle with idioms. They say things like:

Yes, idioms are really difficult for English learners. Maybe you should just learn grammar.

Well, I would disagree with this view. Idioms can seem strange at first but they are not randomly generated – there is always a story behind every idiom, even if the roots of the idiom go back hundreds of years.

The idiom above probably refers to the fact that the horse was seen as a noble animal and was also extremely valuable as a form of transport, unlike a cow or a goat. Therefore, you only actually ate a horse as a last resort – if you were lost in the wilderness with nothing to eat. I doubt that this idiom is used in countries where horse meat is eaten.

In this post, I would like to persuade you that learning idioms is not so difficult and can even be fun.

Reason 1 – Idioms are fun

In my two decades as an English teacher, I can’t remember a student coming up to me to say: learning grammar rules is great fun. But, many students have told me how enjoyable they found a lesson on learning idioms.

Idioms help make ideas, concepts, situations, and feelings more real. They work like stories, using unusual images to reveal something about life. This makes them memorable.

Reason 2 – Idioms are usually fixed expressions

You can’t make many changes to an idiom. Apart from changing the verb tense (and this isn’t often necessary), you don’t tend to alter idioms. They are generally fixed expressions, which means the grammar and the word order can’t be modified much.

To remember them, what you have to do is focus on the content words (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs). As long as you learn the essential parts, you should be able to remember the meaning of the idiom when you hear it.

To run around like a headless chicken has three key words – run, headless, chicken. The grammar words (around, like, a) are not so important and you could even say something like ‘he is running in the same way as a headless chicken’ and native or proficient English speakers would understand what you’re trying to say.

In other words, make learning the content words in an idiom your priority – the grammar words will come with practice and exposure.

Reason 3 – Idioms usually refer to the physical world

Do you remember the difference between concrete and abstract nouns? Concrete nouns are things we can see, hear, feel, touch, and even taste, whereas abstract nouns do not have a physical state. A horse is a concrete noun but happiness is an abstract one.

Most idioms use physical references. They refer to real objects and actions in the physical world. Many idioms are decades of even centuries old and commonly refer to people, actions, animals, geography, cultural practices, food and drink, sports, modes of transport.

This makes them easier to remember and easier to access from your long-term memory because they are stored as images. If I ask you to think of a horse or a mountain, your brain instantly selects an image. Your horse or mountain may not be the same as mine, but we would both recognise each other’s images. When we think of happiness, we may recall events or feelings, and our ‘mental references’ may be very different.

Which is why you should use images to record idioms. Make simple flashcards with the idiom written next to the image.

Enjoy!