I was walking along the beach this morning with Sue, looking out over the waves at the beautiful sunrise and watching the dogs chase crabs in the shore break as the incoming tide rushed up the beach.
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We were having fun discussing idioms and trying to see how many we could remember that related to the sea and the beach.
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Here is a dozen that you probably know, and if you don\u2019t, are great to learn as idioms to help you sound more like a native English speaker or somebody who has a good grasp of conversational English.<\/strong> When you are really happy and everything your life seems to be going really well you can use \u201clife\u2018s a beach \u201c. This has quite the opposite meaning of the more well-known idiom, \u201clife is a bitch \u201cwhich means your life not going well at all, and things are hard. As we walked up towards the rocks just on the inside of the bay, the Seine netters had beached their boat on the shore and were gathering the nets, sifting through their catch and throwing all of the smaller fish back and putting the bigger ones into the baskets to take to the market. An idiom I was reminded of as I watched some of the fish flopping around on the beach is \u201clike a fish out of water\u201c which is used to describe a situation where you are not comfortable in the surroundings you find yourself in, or you feel awkward because you\u2019re very different from the people around you. An example of this could be when you walk into a party and everyone around you is speaking English fluently, and you can only grasp certain bits of the conversation, you may feel like \u201ca fish out of water\u201c.<\/strong> When you are chatting with friends describing the opportunities that will be available to you once you have mastered English, an idiom to use is \u201cthe world is your Oyster \u201cand the expression means that you can do anything you want in life in a given situation, that you have no limitations at all when you have achieved what you set out. An example of using this idiom is \u201conce I have mastered English and I am able to speak like a native English speaker the world will be my oyster \u201c.<\/strong> Let\u2019s say that you arrive in America as an immigrant that knows little or nothing of the country\u2019s culture and you feel completely unsure. An idiom you can use in a situation like this are \u201dfresh off the boat\u201d. Let\u2019s use it in a sentence\u2026\u201dJohn Van Tonder arrived in the United States last week, and he doesn\u2019t even know where he\u2019s going to stay. He is fresh off the boat\u201d. Let\u2019s leave the sea and beach idioms for a while and think about six idioms with examples that you can use in everyday conversation to help you sound more like a native English speaker. I\u2019ll give you the idiom as well an example of how you could use them in everyday conversation. To really understand English as it is spoken in real life you have to be familiar with idioms. Thinking of these idioms made me laugh as I thought of their literal translation. Learning idioms makes English really fun and will certainly help you sound more confident and more like a native English speaker.
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