If you've ever interacted with someone who speaks a different language, what is the funniest misunderstanding you've had?
If you've ever interacted with someone who speaks a different language, what is the funniest misunderstanding you've had?
An example of what I mean:
I, in China, told an English speaking Chinese friend I needed to stop off in the bathroom to "take a shit."
He looked appalled and after I asked why he had that look, he asked what I was going to do with someone's shit.
I had not laughed so hard in a while, and it totally makes sense.
I explained it was an expression for pooping, and he comes back with, "wouldn't that be giving a shit?"
I then got to explain that to give a shit means you care and I realized how fucked some of our expressions are.
What misunderstandings made you laugh?
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Our Austrian exchange student told us "My sister wants to be a wet".
The v sound is hard for German speakers
No it isn't, they use it all the time - "wenn, was, wo" all read as "v". The "double u" sound is the thing that trips them up - it's common in slavic languages, not so much in germanic ones. For slavic the polish ł or russian "lambda" symbol sound like the "w" in wet. Could also be the accent, but I would wager it was more wires being crossed and saying "wet", instead of a problem with pronounciation
That's true, but I come across a lot of German speakers and I can attest that they seem to find it difficult when speaking English. Or they mix it up a lot anyway. I do it myself fairly often in Dutch with V and F.
it was probably written in a text
Yeah, could also be that, but OP said "told us". Which means they used "w". Unless the sister made a mistake too. But then again, why would she say that in english. Vet in german is "Tierarzt" which isn't close to the english "veterinarian".
I'm just saying I've seen plenty germans text that misspelling. "are we going to the wet tomorrow?" would be a classic misspelling of a German writing English