Abstract: Phraseology is an aspect of languages which, until some theoretical paradigms of the most recent linguistics appeared, had traditionally been approached in a disperse and superficial way. This lack of systematization and deepening into the study of phraseological units has also affected their teaching-learning process. For sociolinguistic, cognitive, and pragmatic reasons, youngsters usually have difficulties to understand and conventionally utilize certain phraseologisms. The present paper analyzes some of the results obtained in a survey about phraseological competence in Catalan carried out with students enrolled in the 1st year of the Translation and Interpreting Degree at the University of Alicante.