It's Raining Cats and Dogs

2.5

Amusing collection of American idioms and expressions for native French speakers. This is so that French people learn to say, ‘Bill has no guts' instead of ‘Bill has nothing in his guts', har har, which is the literal translation of ‘Il n'a rien dans la ventre'. I assume that is a familiar French expression? Some field work required I guess before you invest in these linguistic gems.

My main complaint is that it's all too dry. I want more lewd material personally since both languages have plenty of less polite and therefor more useful expressions. For example, “that is a butt-load of croissants you have there!” This translates via Google Translate or DeepL to “c'est un tas de croissants que vous avez là”, or “that's a bunch of croissants you have there”. And, well that's not going to do the job I wanted. Where's that book?

Example format: Ne réveillez pas le chat qui dort (Don't wake the sleeping cat) is paired with the familiar American expression Let sleeping dogs lie.

Given that French language learners are not the intended audience is this book useful for them? Sure, if it's laying around free as it was in my case. In the multi-modal approach any reading with familiar context can't hurt I guess but I doubt these French expressions are used widely beyond the cotton tops congregating near the carousel with their grand kids.