I can read every word, but it just doesn't mean its literal meaning I'm an editor. I deal with English material all the time. Reading their translated Chinese version, to see if I could make some improvement, making the translation more accurate, more comprehensive, and more adapted to the Chinese language habit. So the essence of my job, is editing Chinese, but I need to understand the original scripts well. Nowadays we have powerful e-dictionary softwares to look up any new words or words you're not sure of. You could even look up those technical terms in add-on dictionaries of specific fields. Very convenient. But there are always some expressions whose meanings you just can't solve with e-dictionaries. If you try to understand it by its literal meaning, it just lead you to some wrong corner. For example recently I encounter this expression 'go back to the drawing board'. I was trying hard to figure out what does this man want to say 'we go back to the drawing board'. 'Go back to this board to do what?' I wondered. There are nothing follows that answers this question, which made me skeptical. Could it mean something else? It is not until I looked it up on Google that I realized it is a metaphorical expression, meaning 'to return to the planning stage, so that a failed project can be planned again'. The problem solved, but it leaves me with a thought that really bothers me: what if I hadn't felt something was wrong with the literal meaning? What if I took it for granted that the words just meant what they looked like and never looked it up on the internet? How can I identify and learn these idioms? Maybe I should buy some dictionary for idioms? But reading dictionaries is so boring I fear I can't persist. Do you have any good ideas how to learn idioms?