Idiomatic Languages

[Pond969]

I seem to recall reading somewhere a statement to the effect that English is a highly idiomatic language and it shares this trait with Russian, French and German (as well as a few other languages). Can I correctly take this to mean that there are a lot of languages that are siginificantly less idiomatic? I speak no more than a smattering of any languages other than English so I have no means to compare... do any people here have opinions or knowledge about this?

[Torsten]

Hi Pond, that's an interesting question. To me it seems that English is more 'idiomatic' than German, mabye this is just my impression but there are so many expressions in English that you simply have to learn by heart. Also, an English word can have so many different meanings. Take the word 'fine' for example. Another 'idiomatic feature' of the English language is that a word usually can be used as a noun as well as a verb and sometimes even as an adjective and/or adverb. This is not the case in German or Russian.
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[Pond969]

That's an interesting observation Torsten, particularly as the writer I mentioned specifically identified German as being in the same idiomatic league as English. Anyone else have any thoughts?