This is a purely curiosity-driven question arising from a silly conversation at work.
In English, we have the phrase “teach your granny to suck eggs” meaning “explain to someone how to do a task they already understand very well.”
What would be the German-language equivalent, and it’s literal English translation?
A direct translation would apparently be “Bring deiner Oma bei, Eier zu lutschen”, but I have no idea if there is a comparable German idiom for that phrase. BTW, I have never heard that expression before. Is it regional?
We do??
:: goes off to Google for awhile ::
Yecch! People slurp raw eggs through a hole in the eggshell? Why???
:: shudder ::
No clue, but in this old thread someone offered a supposed French equivalent:
PONS offers the following:
Google says the direct translation of “Das Ei will klüger sein als die Henne” is “The egg wants to be smarter than the hen!”
Yeah, I have never heard such an expression, or anything close.
I like this expression, and use it at home a lot, but I never expect others to know it. Its honestly a great idea.
“Mansplaning” is the same idea, only mire stringly gendered. (I would argue there’s a genedered component to the original, sonce the image is a little boy who thonks he knows better than borong old grandma)
This makes no sense to me at all. LOL
The phrase about Sucking eggs dates back to the mid 19th century. I’ve been aware of this phrase and its meaning since I was a kid in the 1960’s.
Clearly we live and learn. I thought that the phrase was universal. I’m British, so maybe it’s a regional thing.
It’s almost always used in the sense of “I don’t want to teach Granny to suck eggs, so stop me if you know this” - in other words “I don’t want to patronise you”.
Thanks all.
Could be. I first ran across the phrase in Zombies Run*, a British video game.
*. It’s kind of a video game, but mostly a running game.
American, never heard the phrase. I’ve heard/read “go suck an egg”, but that meaning is more like a polite “fuck off.”
Southern California native. I’ve heard it. I’d always assumed it was a Southernism.
I hadn’t heard the ‘bad teeth’ explanation Qadgop linked to.
My personal interpretation of the phrase is that Grandma already knows how to suck eggs, and that it’s a rather gross way to eat them (most people preferring them cooked). Grandma may have fallen for the prank as a child, but she know better than to suck eggs now. So basically it’s the same as described in the OP, only adding that Grandma knows better than to suck eggs.
Reverso gives two translations:
Will das Ei etwa klüger sein als die Henne (Does the egg want to be smarter than the chicken)
and
Versuchen dem Hund das Bellen beizubringen (Try to teach a dog to bark)
The first one at least seems to be a real saying.
Native German here. Never heard of it, which of course doesn’t mean that this phrase doesn’t exist, but at least it’s very uncommon. And I’m racking my brain for an equivalent saying in German, but I’m drawing a blank. I thought of “Einem alten Hund bringt man keine neuen Tricks bei”, but that seems to be an adaption of the English saying “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”.
I had my grandma teach me how to get a hollow egg shell by making holes on each pole and then blowing the contents out. She’d then use the eggs in cooking and I’d make fancy lightweight decorated easter eggs with the shell!
We did that once in elementary school.
I knew the English phrase (patting myself on the back here 
), but I don’t think there is a German (or Spanish, for that matter) equivalent. There is Eulen nach Athen bringen, which is like the English “to bring coal to Newcastle” (or the Spanish llevar putas a París or llevar café a Colombia), which is somewhat related. But not the same.
Does “putas” mean what I think it means? 
Yes, it does.