How many times have you heard your students asking the question, “why don’t they say it like we do?”, when stumbling across an idiomatic form of vocabulary or an unfamiliar syntactic structure which they find difficult to understand. There is a multitude of examples: simple prepositional differences such as “on the plane” or “on the TV” are obvious ones. Some of the differences are purely structural, such as the lack of plural markers on such terms as “information”, “luggage”, “furniture” or “people”. Others are obviously cultural such as the metaphorical difference in the expression “to have a frog in one’s throat”. In both cases, however, we detect in the students’ surprise a lack of cultural awareness which can be a partial block to acquisition of vocabulary.