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?
My friend tried to call me a "night owl" because we tended to talk very late at night for my time zone. She accidentally called me a "lady of the night".
EDIT: "lady of the night" is a term for prostitute
I don't remember the details, but a similar situation on a ship with people from all over the world, resulted in my shift being called "vampire shift". It was very suitable too, as I got up at sunset, and my shift was over around dawn. I liked it that way - it kept me out of the sun.
EDIT: This was in addition to the other shifts; day shift (noon->midnight), night shift (midnight->noon), and chief shift (0600->1800). My shift was a weird one that only I had so that I could overlap with both day and night and cover for the chief tech during his off hours.
Kind of like "graveyard shift", which isn't a funny translation, it's commonly used (where I live) slang for the overnight shift. I like "vampire shift" better than "graveyard".
Yeah, honestly I'd keep that one.
We had two female black cats named Midnight and Luna,
When guests would come over ask about our young children about the cats, a child would explain to the adult guests that Midnight and Luna were our ladies of the night, explaining that Luna means moon.
This went on for years.
Friend: You're a talkative owl-whore! 😂
You: ☹️
Not my story, but one a friend told me.
Someone had the misconception that there was a huge, huge sector of labor dedicated to working in cemeteries in the USA. Like almost everyone knew at least one person who worked at a cemetery. This misconception arose due to the ubiquity of the term "graveyard shift" regardless of the actual job being performed.
What is a graveyard shift?
It typically refers to any job where you're working overnight, like from midnight to 8AM.
When your scheduled working hours is during the nighttime, 12am - 5 am or so
One time when I was a kid, we went on a long car trip and a thunderstorm approached. My dad said, "Don't worry about the sound. It's the light that kills you!" My Japanese mom was not cool with this. "No, it's the sound. What are you talking about?" A fierce argument ensued.
So, the words for thunder and lightning in Japanese are kaminari and inazuma, respectively. But that's not a perfect translation. kaminari means something like "peal of the gods", and is the forceful, dangerous part. inazuma is basically just a light show.
English is the opposite. Thunder is just a sound, while lightning can kill you. To put it another way, in English, one word is light + electricity while the other is sound. In Japanese, one word is sound + electricity while the other is light.
Anyway, I was about to speak up when my big brother tugged my arm. "No. This is a popcorn moment. Don't ruin it!"
They're both wrong, it's the electricity that kills you. Light and sound are just side effects.
Okay, but try telling that to the people who came up with the words a thousand years ago.
This is fascinating to learn.
One time when I was a kid,
That's how childhood and passage of time works.
In Spain, my first real long-term girlfriend. American. We are visiting some of my relatives. She speaks passable Spanish. My aunt ask her something. She replies that she's embarrassed, but she uses a "false -friend", Embarazada, which means pregnant in Spanish. Me knowing what was going on, let the thing run for a bit. When explanations came there was a hilarious bit of manga size eyes and laughs.
The other day there was a girl on the train responding to the conductor saying "Nächster Halt, Itzehoe" (next stop, Itzehoe), which sounds exactly like "It's a hoe". She went "It's a what!?" with her companion cracking up immediately.
When my wife was in university, she went on an exchange with a dozen other students to a Chinese university. The program assigned her group a pair of local guides.
The first night, the guides offered to take them out for snake. Everyone refused.
The second night, the guides repeatedly offered everyone snake, saying that there were plenty of local places to get snake. Everyone refused.
The third night, her group had a discussion. They didn't want to offend their gracious hosts. Snake had to be a popular local delicacy, because the guides repeated their offer daily.
They decided to be adventurous. One of them spoke up: "yes, we would like to try snake..."
The guide said, "what kind of snake do you want? chips? hot dog?"
Well to preface this, 6 months ago I moved to Japan to study Japanese.
During a trip to Tokyo I randomly ended up talking to a group of salarymen on the way to the same restaurant at me in akihabara. After a while they asked me if I live in Japan and I answered yes and then proceeded to say 日本にしんでいる instead of 日本に住んでいる, for those who don’t speak Japanese, I accidentally said I am dying in Japan instead of I am living in Japan which is surprisingly close pronounciation wise lol. This was met with loads of laughs
My favourite story like that is from my dad, who was WW2 vet. After the war, he wound up in Japan and attended a conference where someone stepped up to the podium and introduced himself as General McArthur's Chief Advisor. Or at least he thought he did…
The word for advisor is komon. The word for asshole or anus is koumon. Basically, you just hold out the first o out slightly longer and it switches to the other word.
I feel like this is too coincidental to be a coincidence.
koumon
My parents forced me to attend after school tutoring when I was a kid, at a place called "Kumon" 🤔
Haha i am just starting to learn Japanese and I gotta say its challenging but so fun. I love the grammar, at least as far as I understand it at this point. Like Yoda's grammar it is.
The yoda grammar thing never really worked for me, the Japanese grammar is so different from the other languages I speak that I just could never translate in my head.
When it comes to Japanese, either I know how to say something naturally or I don’t, I can’t do convoluted English (or other languages) to Japanese translation in my head and then speak
I used to have trouble with RPN calculators until I realized it's better to think in Japanese.
For example, when I go:
3 enter 5 plus 2 divide
I'm thinking:
san to go tasi-te ni-de waru
It just feels more natural.
To live and die in Japan, that's the place to beeee...
Years ago, when I first moved to America from the UK, I was working in a pretty quiet office that backed on to a field. One day mouse appeared, freaked out a couple of the gals in the office, and then it ran and hid under an office cube.
I investigated to see where it was hiding, but it was pretty dark down there. So I asked if either of the gals had a torch. They both got an expression of wide-eyed horror, which confused me for a few seconds.
Then I realized that torch had a different term in America. So I corrected myself and asked if either of them had a flashlight. And they looked very relieved. They thought I was going to get an old school torch and try to smoke the mouse out or set it on fire, and probably set the whole cube on fire in the process.
I was in North Carolina for work recently and one lady was talking about her local brewery where she could "grab her growler" and head over there. Took me a while to recover from laughing at that one.
Maybe they thought you were accepting the classic introductory RPG quest?
Gotta get that xp somehow.
Thank god you didn't ask them if you could borrow a rubber.
UK English: Eraser.
US English: Condom.
It was actually nonverbal - I didn't understand the so-called "Indian head wag." Working with a lot of programmers from India, I was often faced with that sort of gyrating head gesture while explaining something. To me as an American it kind of means well yeah sort of, or okay but not really - but in India it indicates understanding, like a simple head nod in America. I couldn't figure out why so many people seemed to think I was being unclear. I would repeat things or say them in a different way, and sometimes they would do the head gyration even more - turned out they were just saying okay.
my grandfather (polish) was talking to my cousin's boyfriend at the time (german) in english. the poor guy was trying to make a good impression so he was really going the extra mile. it took about 10 minutes for them to realize one was talking about chess, and the other about jazz.
I made this comment about a year ago: https://midwest.social/comment/6247683
"A friend of mine is a non-native English speaker. He teaches at an elementary school and works with ‘English as a second language’ students. He casually mentioned that he always tells his students to take a ‘horse bath’ in the bathroom sink after recess if needed. He was traumatized when I told him that he’d misheard that phrase for his entire adult life."
What's the real phrase?
Whores bath. It’s when you hit up the bathroom to freshen your junk before you get busy
"Whore bath" is how I've heard it
So he wanted to tell them to clean up their junk, but mixed up the phrase?
I used to work with a Ukranian coworker, who had so little of an accent that I often forgot he was not a native English speaker.
One time during a meeting, I mentioned "there's more than one way to skin a cat" and I can still picture the horrified look on his face when he processed what I just said.
In all fairness, it's a pretty morbid expression!
I have a Moldovan friend who does have a thick accent and had a lot of trouble saying "beach" and "beaches" for a bit.
Once he found out why people were laughing, he decided to keep saying he "loved going to Florida for the bitches" anyway.
I used to hang about with this Italian couple, and I remember smoking outside a pub with them years ago when I sort of offhandedly said "it's like the difference between shit and sheet", and one said "what's the difference?" so of course I spent a good ten minutes trying to demonstrate the difference by saying "shit" and "sheet" over and over with them trying to copy me. The bouncer loved it.
We have a climate chamber ("Klima-Kammer in German) at work for testing products, and my Ukrainian coworker kept referring to it as the "camera", I thought that was funny.
The Dutch word "poepen" (taking a shit), is a Belgian euphemism for sex. Which is always a great source of fun when making friends near the southern border.
Talking to someone from Korea in VRChat and they only knew some English.
Someone said Cancer and they got all excited saying they knew that word, it means leage of legends.
They're not wrong...
after hours gaming at work with awesome ukrainian colleague.
we all get regular beers from the fridge. ukrainian co-worker is sitting there and suddenly spits his drink all over the floor and looks utterly grossed out. He reads the label with scrutiny and says loudly 'guys, vat thee fak is ROOT BEER?!'
oh how we laughed
Me learning ginger beer =/= ginger ale
So what is it? Is it beer? Another fermented beverage? Is it soda?
It’s a traditional American soda that many Europeans hate. I’ve heard that it tastes like herbal toothpaste to them, but in America the only herb in our toothpaste is mint (though cinnamon is increasingly popular despite being a spice). But anyways yeah it’s a soda flavored like certain medicinal roots.
It is soda traditionally made with sassafras bark. I doubt they still use that to make it but in my (probably unpopular) opinion, it tastes like garbage.
My Dutch friend. We were on discord playing guild wars and the topic of alcohol came up. The majority of the group are british and we were talking about different drinks like whisky, gin etc and the question came up "so what famous dutch spirits are there?".
There was a bit of silence before he said, "I don't know, William of Orange?". Turns out he had never heard of the word 'spirit' to refer to high proof alcohol before so selected a famous historical dutch figure.
I could imaging a William of Orange rum. Bet it would taste pretty good.
The answer, of course is "jenever".
The funnier answer is "witte wieven"
The majority of the group are british and we were talking about different drinks like whisky, gin etc and the question came up "so what famous dutch spirits are there?".
In case you want an actual answer to that question, look up the history of gin.
This was a rather long time ago, my gin and oude en jonge jenever collection has rather grown since then lol
I heard a story about how in world war 2 British and American generals got into an argument about the importance of a certain matter.
The British thought the matter needed to be tabled and the Americans were shocked and thought it must not be tabled.
Took some time for them to realize "tabling" an issue meant the exact opposite in America and UK
Since hearing that story the exact expression came up for me online once and on a work call once with British and American speakers.
No foreign language, but still.
How the turn tables
Me. A white boy teenager.
My best friend. Child of first gen Chinese immigrants. Fluent in Cantonese and English. Compared to his parents, he is very westernized. Can I call him a Twinkie? I mean, we aren't friends anymore, but that seems like an "our word" kind of word, and that's not mine.
Anyway...His parents own a Chinese restaurant. He gets me a job there in high school.
One day, my friend calls to me by my full name. One of the chefs hears it and repeats it to confirm what he heard.
It's at that point, dear reader, that my friend realizes that, if said with a Cantonese inflection, my last name sounds exactly like a common vulgarity of that tongue.
I won't say what it is, because it's a pretty uncommon name. But I will say that for several weeks after that, every single time I walked into the kitchen, I'd be greeted by all the cooks like Norm walking into Cheers.
I went to the doctor because I was worried about me grinding my teeth (bruxism).
Instead of saying "hagishiri" or 歯ぎしり I said "hagEshiri" or ハゲ尻
so I told to the doctor I was worried about my bald ass.
Haha amazing.
An American, English speaking friend was told to order food in Chinese while we were there and ended up making the whole restaurant laugh when he very loudly let her know he was sterile. According to our hosts haha.
I heard a story of an American student in Beijing asking for "paigu mien" (pork rib noodles), but he rather confused the waitress by asking for "pigu mien", bottom (arse) noodles!
As I’m half Arab/half European, my Arabian family tried to talk my native language. One of them wanted to say “I love you” which is in Dutch “Ik hou van je”.
He ended up saying; “ik geil van je” which translates along the likes of “I get horny of you”.
Had a good laugh but was bit odd to explain lol.
Kinda reminds me of how in Spanish, it's common to say "te quiero" as a sweet, friendly way of telling someone you love them.
Of course it translates literally as "I want you", which sounds SO SEXUAL in English 😂
Also in Spanish, you want to say “Tengo calor” = “I have heat” instead of “Estoy caliente” = “I am hot”, because the latter is used to mean “I am horny”.
My Spanish teacher also told us of a time he had taken a class to a Spanish speaking country and a student accidentally broke a glass while in a restaurant. The student wanted to exclaim “I am very embarrassed!”, but used a false cognate and instead exclaimed “Estoy muy embarazada!” = “I am very pregnant!”
Ah dutch.
I've heard someone translate "dat is geweldig" not with the correct "that is amazing" but "that is like violence", which shows amazing skill in Dutch grammar, but a tiny lack in knowing words.
For those not fluent:
"Geweldig" means "Amazing", but "geweld" means "violence". Meanwhile, most words that end in "-ig" are nouns used as adjectives, like "fun" -> "funny".
Similar thing happened to me with the Spanish speaking coworkers Lol. I wanted to ask a new guy his name (but trying not to say "¿como te llamas?" Which means "how are you called?) and accidentally asked for his number.
Nombre ≠ numero
I had an ESL coworker make a similar mistake to me. Mixing up name-nombre/number-numero goes both ways.
geil = horny
is that the origin of the German word?
I've lived in a couple of European countries and speak 7 different European languages (though my German is kinda crap and my Italian not much better) and regularly take the piss by playing the "ignorant foreigner" with the expressions in other people's languages and acting as if, by translating them literally, I totally misunderstood them.
This works great because there are so many expressions in pretty much all languages which are have entirelly different meanings when interpreted literally but the natives don't really think about it like that because they just learned that stuff as a whole block of meaning rather than having reached it by climb the language-learning ladder from "understanding the words first" as foreigners do.
For example the English expression "I want to pick your brains" which has quite a different and more gruesome meaning if read literally or one the dutch expressions for "you're wasting time in small details" which translates quite literally to "you're fucking ants" and is my all time favorite in all languages I speak well enough to know lots of expressions in.
Wow I'm gonna make "you're fucking ants" a regular expression in my english vocab. I will provide no details when I confuse people.
Tbf mierenneuken is also a very odd expression to me as a Dutch person.
Huh. Maybe you could help me.
I’m listening to Stromae, Pomme - Ma Meilleure Ennemie (from Arcane Season 2) Lyrics w/ translation.
And one line is “Mais comme dit le diction: Plutôt qu’être seul mieux vaut être mal accompagne.”
French (sorry for butchering some of the letters, I’ve a Nordic layout), roughly for “But as the saying goes: Better than alone, is to be in bad company.”
Reading that, I remembered a Spanish line from last weeks episode of “The Day of the Jackal”: “Mejor solo que mal acompañado.”
“It’s better to be alone than in bad company.”
Opposite sayings?
A difference in views between the French and the Spanish?
Yeah, it does sound like they're opposite sayings.
I wasn't aware of the French saying, but was of the Spanish one, plus there's one which is exactly the same as the Spanish one in Portuguese.
That said, feeding "Plutôt qu’être seul mieux vaut être mal accompagne" to DDG gives pretty much only results with the saying "Mieux vaut être seul que mal accompagné", which is the same as in Spanish and Portuguese, so I'm thinking that the lyrics of the song are in fact purposefully reversing the well known saying "Mieux vaut être seul que mal accompagné" for impact.
To understand lyrics by Stromae you need to check the French version of the lyrics on genius.com as there are explanations added by friendly native speakers. The texts are full of connotation, context, idioms - I’ve not seen anything like it in any modern song. It’s very cumbersome to translate all of that but I found it rewarding. Especially the lyrics of Papaoutai and Bâtard are masterpieces.
Check out your best enemy here: https://genius.com/Stromae-and-pomme-ma-meilleure-ennemie-lyrics
I'm learning Dutch so I can eventually move there, what phrase is that? Wasn't mentioned here
It's "mieren neuken".
A dutch person responding to my post already mentioned it.
Also, as somebody who has moved there first and then learned Dutch whilst living there, I do recommend just learning it over there since it's a much faster way to learn a language when you're there surrounded by native speakers, with lots of things written in Dutch around you and with Dutch TV and Radio whilst actually using it, than it is as just learning from the outside with little in the way of useful practice with the actual experts of the actual language.
Also you can easily get away with using English in The Netherlands whilst you're learning Dutch - in fact if you have a recognizable accent from an English-speaking country it's actually hard to get the Dutch to speak Dutch to you in the early and mid stage of learning their language since they tend to switch to English as most Dutch speak that very well.
I, an English speaker, was interacting with a Spanish patient at work. It was me first week, and it had been a long while since I had spoken Spanish but I had been nearly fluent for years. The patient had neck pain. I walked in and very confidently asked "Donde esta el dolor en su culo?" They looked shocked, turned red and said, "OH NO!" and I immediately realized I asked them "Where is the pain in your asshole?" confusing culo (asshole) with cuello (neck). I apologized profusely and they couldn't stop laughing about it during the whole appointment. Good times.
Have a coworker who regularly says "Choca my life," to brush off little annoyances. He'll also say "Choca your life" in a sing-song gallows humor way to express sympathy for annoyances other are going through.
Anyway, I had just started at the job and we were having a Thanksgiving lunch where everyone was going to bring a dish. I was going to bring a Sopapilla Cheesecake and he was excited about it, but the night before the meal when I went to turn the oven on it wouldn't heat up (turned out to be a bad breaker).
The next morning I'm telling the story and appologizing for not bringing the desert, and he comes up and says "Choca your life!", which I hadn't heard him say before.
What I heard was "Choke on your lies!"
I was thinking this guy was serious about his cheesecake.
Chatting on Skype with a Chinese developer, he said "I need to take Friday off for family matters" and I said "no worries"
He apologized profusely, and eventually I realised that to him, "no worries" meant something like "No! I am very concerned!"
I've since taught them some more Australianisms.
That one is also in the states lol.
I was once working with a team in India to resolve a database issue. During a particular call, we had to export data several times to create backups. Exporting the DB data is done with "dump" commands and my Indian counterpart would repeatedly tell me that he "took a dump just now".
The taking/giving/reaching out term differences between Indian dialect and American English caused me some confusion on one of my calls. They kept saying they were trying to “take RDP from” server A to server B. I interpreted that as connecting from A to B, since they used the word “from.”
It took a bit, but I eventually realized that there seemed to be to be a fundamental difference in the way these things are thought about.
Americans, we always are reaching toward, pointing to, connecting to, or connecting something from HERE to THERE, like we’re shooting a gun or drawing a line. That is not how these Indian guys were looking at it.
If you are “taking RDP from” server A to server B, then that means you are on server B trying to connect to server A. It’s more like if you were to imagine reaching out with your hand and grabbing something toward you.
This is super interesting and I often wonder how differences in thought patterns, as they relate to a language, affect the culture of the language speakers themselves.
Do those speaking that dialect have like a cultural feeling that they need to "take" or "receive" or otherwise "acquire" a thing (like RDP) to make a connection? This as opposed to what I see as a very american way of looking at things (again using RDP as an example here), where "we've already got it, so will give it to you to make the connection."
It feels like, and I could be very wrong, one comes from a place of not being accustomed to already having what they need, vs taking for granted the things they have and "sending it forth" or whatever.
Lol. I would always reply with something like "That's nice, but did you also take a backup?" or "During the call???".
Hahaha, I'm using this in the future, just for laughs.
my now wife is american. i learned uk english. one day we and some friends sat in a team speak voice chat. my now wife asks where XY is. i tell them, that they left to smoke a fag (which is uk söang for smokeing a cigerette). She was very concerned to say the least.
no spouse of mine is gonna be friends with a homophobic killer
One of my 2 am cringe memories involves loudly asking my 3rd grade classmates if anyone would like a kiss.
I meant the chocolate.
I also had a fun experience in Belgium where a guy at a bar approached me and we each just tried different languages until we landed on one that we both knew. (I know this is common in Europe but you don't run into this in North America as often)
Loose fit, but my family lived in Australia for a few years. We're German. One night, my dad feels like a shake after a long drive to a vacation spot, so he drives up to a McDonald's and orders, the rest of the family dozing in the car.
"One erdber shake, please."
"Excuse me?"
"One erdber shake, please?"
"... I don't understand."
At this point my mum realized.
"Oh, a strawberry shake!"
We all have a bit of a laugh. He said the German word for strawberry, but pronounced it English. None of us in the car realized and we all understood. The lady in the drive through said she thought they invented a new flavor she didn't know about.
He also swaps the th and s in Thous Australia. :)
I had sort of the reverse, working with German-speaking coworkers. I used the term "schpiel" to refer to a long talk I was going to give. This led to a moment of confusion because that's not what the word means in German. It means "game" or "play" and in the context they thought I meant to imply that I was not taking the speech seriously, or maybe wasn't going to be completely honest. Almost like a con. That's probably how the loanword first entered the English language, and its meaning has drifted over time.
The word spiel “schpiel” is of Yiddish origin. It comes from the Yiddish word shpil (שפּיל), which means “play” or “game” same as German.
Yiddish and German are like Spanish and Portuguese. They are of course different languages, but there is a lot of overlap in vocabulary. I don't know which language was the vector for the word.
My work once sent me to Madrid. I only have some high school Spanish.
I had a cold at the time and soon ran out of cough drops. My coworker told me where I could buy some more, and what to ask for.
When I got to the store, apparently I misremembered what he told me to say. I said to the woman, "quiero caramelos de mentales."
She looked at me confused. I tried again, slower: "caramellos...de...mentales?"
She seemed a bit alarmed. She said something in Spanish. I said "lo siento, no comprendo."
She called over her coworker, who asked me "what are you looking for?"
I said, "cough drops." She looked confused. "Cough...drops? What is it?" I tried "caramelos de mentales" again, no success, just confusion.
Then I remembered I had some wrappers in my pocket so I pulled one out and showed her. Suddenly they both beamed with understanding. "Ohhh! Caramelos mentolados! You were asking for 'brain candies.' She thought you wanted something illegal."
George Carlin talked about this, "Take a shit? You don't take a shit, you leave a shit! That's the whole idea!"
I don't have an anecdote, but I do have a good joke.
Late at night, a German coast guard radio operator gets a distress call. A British ship has capsized and is quickly taking on water.
"We're sinking, we're sinking!!" The panicked sailor yells over the radio.
Confused, the German operator takes a minute then responds "What are you... sinking about?"
I read a really interesting article in the past by one of the designers of the ad, talking about how it got made from start to end, and almost didn't come to be. Unfortunately google is so shit now I can't seem to find any trace of it.
I know I am completely ruining the joke, however that is not even remotely proper radio protocol - and yes I am German, how did you know?
You only have your own countrymen to blame, since that video came from you guys.
I went to Mexico and told a lot of people that they don't speak Spanish. When someone said something that I couldn't hear well, I'd compliment their digestion.
Right phrase: No hablo Español (I don't speak Spanish)
What I said: No hablas Español (you don't speak Spanish)Right phrase: Que dices (What you say)
What I said Que diges (what digestion!)I think most people can guess as it's very common to hear the "no habla" one.
I've got one though: A roommate told his new Spanish boyfriend that she wasn't feeling like meeting his parents because she was "muy embarazada".
Turns out that's not embarrassed, that's pregnant.
That's a really common one here in San Antonio where people speak conversational Spanish but don't know more formal words like that. One of my friends tripped and fell in front of her family visit from Mexico. It was at our graduation and she stepped on her gown. She said "estoy embarazada" and everyone freaked out, running to her aid. Her parents were really confused how their lesbian daughter got pregnant.
A friend of mine was doing work-study in France and thought she was offering to show her coworkers her cat. Thankfully her coworkers informed her that she was being more than just friendly and how to actually offer to show her feline.
Strange how in polite French society, there are no female cats. Similar to rabbits in Spain...
Is the difference here like chat and chatte? I'm not familiar with the French word for female genitalia.
Nor dogs in America
I was in a sign language class (ASL) around Halloween and the instructor asked if we had ever encountered a ghost. We thought he signed tornado so we signed about times we were near tornadoes while he’s looking on with disbelief and shock and awe about all of our supernatural encounters. We had a good laugh when we figured out the confusion.
Portuguese in Portugal has a slang word for queue, which is exactly the same as the Brasilian Portuguese slang word for queer.
I have on more than one occasion had to explain to Brasilian acquaintances that I had not just stated I was going to visit a queer person but that I was going to stand on a queue.
Queue means tail in french
I was going to stand on a queue
Yeah, that tail too
Similar story! I teach Capoeira, am not Beasilian. Part of the tradition is coming up with students' "apelido", like an alias for them as a martial artist. We try to pick things that are cool, or ironically amusing (but kind).
Well there's this bigger teenage boy in my class who's getting REALLY strong. Great kid. Sings real strong too. Has been hitting the weights I think.
"Cannon". I thought. "That's badass and not too elaborate. He's loud and he hits hard. Perfect!" So I look up the translation and submit my suggestions.
"That's gonna need a change..." my Professor says with a chuckle.
"...Canhão means 'lesbian'."
Where does this slang come from?!? My research gave zero indication of this possibility lmao. SO glad he double checked me.
Similarly confusing, a lot of Capoeira songs feature the lyrics "vamo vadia" which I'm told is like, "Let's go hang out / loiter / chill." According to google translate...vadia directly means "bitch."
This beautiful language intimidates me. 😂
Ok that’s badass
I was told to better not call a Brazilian girl "garota" even though in Portugal, that's perfectly acceptable.
That word isn't originally from Portuguese from Portugal (though it is recognized thanks to the prevalence of Brazilian soap operas in Portugal) so it carries no broader "social" meaning and isn't even commonly used there, so people wouldn't care if you used it in Portugal as it just sounds odd there.
If I understand the broader meaning subtleties of how it's used in Brazilian Portuguese correctly, using "garota" for a woman is a bit like using "chick" for a woman in British English, which whilst not an outright insult carries a bit of a demeaning vibe (not as bad as the used of "bitch" - as in "my bitch" - in American English, but the same kind of treating women as inferior).
This is probably because the original meaning of the word when not used for an adult woman (again, only in Brazilian Portuguese since it didn't exist in Portuguese from Portugal) is "young girl".
If there's one important thing to learn from this thread, it is that idioms do not translate. At all.
And for some of us they're difficult in our first language. I mean what the fuck does "he wears his heart on his sleeve mean?" He would die.
Some years ago I was learning Chinese, I was excited and eager to practice after learning only a couple phrases, so one day I see this young lady handing out flyers downtown, I confidently approach her and say "ni hao!" and she replies "I'm Korean". To make things worse the flyers were actually from a Korean learning institute.
Cue Hallmark theme
My argentenian friend called stuffed crust pizza "the pizza with cheese borders".
Still call it that almost 20 years later.
Slightly morbid academic one.
My computer science professor (who is from Eastern Europe) was explaining an algorithm that he and another professor (from South America) developed. The algorithm processes a graph by first creating a "frame" around it. Since English was not the first language for either of them, the first word they thought of was karkas (каркас, frame in Russian). English word "carcass" sounds pretty much the same, right? but only later, after the work was submitted, they realized they were creating a dead body around the graph.
it's worse when you do speak the language, but your laziness in one language affects the other: in spanish, if you leave out the punctuation like it's english, you could accidentally end up texting people that your potato is into anal gangbangs instead of into how much your dad likes new years parties. lol
mi papa disfruta fiestas por ano neuvo (my potato likes new anal gangbangs)
vs
mi papá disfruta fiestas por año nuevo (my father likes new years parties)
Oh I think we have a winner….
Mi papa disfruta fiestas por año nuevo (My potato likes New Year’s parties)
Vs
Mi papá disfruta fiestas por ano nuevo (My father likes new anal gangbangs)
🤣🤣🤣
Well, in European Spanish it would mean "Pope", not "potato", so it's a worthy contender
To be fair, ñ in Spanish is a whole letter by itself and not just a funny n. As in, it has its own entry in the alphabet, and it has a dedicated key on the keyboard. So even lazy people don't write n instead :P
As yes, I've told someone how many assholes I have before.
This happens within English too.. I'm a climate scientist, and I was working in consulting talking to some financial risk people. They were asking us for a "conservative" risk figures. In climate science that would naturally mean a low warming projection. For them it meant being conservative in their appetite for risk, so actually more like a worst-case example. That one took a couple of heated meetings to figure out.
And here I initially thought politics when I heard climate change and conservative in the same sentence. As in, "Climate change is not seen as a risk to conservatives."
“Conservatives believe it’s caused by earth’s natural processes, therefore in order to explain the results we’re seeing please consult vulcanologists and geologists because apparently it’s multiple apocalyptic events not just the one”
Was in Spain on a Spanish club field trip. I forget what I did as it was years ago but I wanted to express how embarrassed I was about something.
Used the word 'embarrasada'.
Hilarity ensued.
Edit: Oh look! Other people in this thread did the same thing lol. I feel so much better.
The Spanish word embarrasada means "pregnant" and not "embarrassed".
My favorite anecdote revolves around the many meanings of shit, which is hardly surprising, since the way this word is used in English is in no way forthcoming to a non native speaker.
So I was sitting in this call between my company (a medium size German tech company) and a big US corporation, discussing the development of a tool that we were doing for them. The people on both sides all knew each others at least in passing, and one of the people asked if one of my collegues was in the call, too.
Them: "So, is mr. X here, too?" Us: "No, mr. X had another appointment." Them: "Ah okay. Mr. X really is the shit." My collegues: wait...what? did they just...? Me, to my collegues: it's good, it's good, it wasn't an insult! My collegues, getting more and more aggrevated: "Did you just call mr. X 'shit'?" Them, not understanding: "What? NO!"
The Americans did not understand what the problem was, because they did not really think about what they said and that it might not be understood the way it was meant by a non native speaker.
It took a lot of explaining from my side after the call to cool my people down. They were completely bewildered, and they could not believe that calling someone "the shit" could possibly be a compliment. Me, I had a big big laugh the entire time.
When I was living in Japan (about 20 years ago now), I was dating a Filipino woman who spoke very good English. But I quickly learned that she didn't understand colloquialisms.
There was one day when she kept calling me multiple times throughout the day. After the 5th or 6th call, I picked up the phone and said, "Jeez, you're killing me!"
She immediately started crying and asked, "Why would you ever say that?! I would never kill you!" Which got a laugh out of me and just made her cry even harder.
I quickly realized she didn't understand English expressions. I explained it to her, but she said she didn't want me to ever say it again, because just hearing the accusation hurt her, even if I didn't literally mean it.
While dating her, I became hyper vigilant to the amount of expressions we use in English. I had to continually rephrase everything I said because I caught myself using so many colloquialisms that she just didn't understand. She took everything so literally!
We visited an office, and the person guiding us around told us about one of the employees that "it is his first day" - we all misheard this as "it is his birthday". And started to sing...
day 2 at a new job
Boss's boss and I are the only two there.
Boss^2: Vhat is za status of our new office in Catalina
Me: O.o (They have offices all over the place but I am not aware it's someplace named Catalina exists, I've heard of the dressing before so maybe it's a thing?)
I...um I'm not sure
Boss^2: Well, you need to find out.
Me: I don't even have anybody's phone number yet this is just my second day if you have some people you'd like me to call I can do that.
Boss^2: yez, look up the office and call them and ask them what their status is.
Me: (starts googling Catalina, an island in California? That wouldn't make any sense. A region in Spain Catalonia? That would make a little more sense but still not a lot and I don't speak Spanish)
Boss^2: well?
Me: I can't find an office in Catalina or Catalonia. You wouldn't happen to have their phone number would you
Boss^2: Catalina, Catalina, CAT-O-LINA, sea ate aya oh lee n ya
Me: Wait, Carolina, I'm so sorry let me find them.
(Rings, voicemail) It's 8:00 a.m., there's no one there yet.
Boss^2: rrr o k
Guy I worked with when younger, at a restaurant, primarily a Spanish speaker. He kept telling me that another one of our co-workers "won the race"... I had no idea what he was talking about. "He win the race, he win it!"
What race? Eventually he expands to say it was easier to say in Spanish, but basically if there was a race to be fat and ugly, this guy would win that hypothetical race.
He was very pleased with himself.
I would love to hear the actual idiom if anyone out there knows it haha
Eventually he expands to say it was easier to say in Spanish, but basically if there was a race to be fat and ugly, this guy would win that hypothetical race.
There's a very similar expression in English: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/take_the_cake
Its less a misunderstanding I had as I grew up with Chinese speakers, but it is always fun to take a new grad student/postdoc out to lunch or something similar.
Because every language has "filler words". In English that is usually "uhm" or "like".
In Mandarin? It is "that one". 那个, Nèi ge.
And "nèi ge" sounds a LOT like the n-word. Fortunately I have found that most college towns and places that are used to an international community pick up on it pretty quick, but it is still REAL awkward when you get a side eye from a black person because this visiting scholar is trying to remember an English word.
Haha I heard that a lot over there. Its a similar sound to the phrase "this one" or maybe "that one". they both end in ge, but one starts with a ne sound, if I remember correctly. This was a long time ago
From my Chinese bosses, they translated it as "that one/ looks like" apparently it has multiple uses depending on context.
I was resolving a conflict once and, instead of saying "make up or breakup", I said "make out or breakout". The fact I screwed that up probably helped the conflict cease though.
Mrs. Ersatz86, native Spanish speaker with (normally) great English skills, to our daughter and I:
Wait, you guys went to the pub without me?
Me: Well, you were at yoga.
Mrs. Ersatz86: Did you at least stop at the liquor store?
Me: Sure did!
Mrs. Ersatz86: Well where's the booze? What am I, shoplifter?
Me: ... blinks...
Me: do you mean "chopped liver"?
Pandemonium.
I have only ever heard the story, but my grandma came over here from Germany after WW2 to marry my grandpa (American Army) after they met in Germany.
Anyway, they are driving and she is learning English and she gets horrified and says, “THEY SELL THAT HERE?!”
My grandpa turns the car around and drive back to read the sign which had “pups for sale”. Because she was German and the U is usually pronounced with an OOH sound, well…she quickly learned how to say “pups” in English.
Quick addition: 'Pups' means 'fart' in German. A word used by and around children. Or if you have enjoyed an education.
Awesome! Thanks for sharing that trivia!
Not exactly a misunderstanding but... my dad (a professor here in the U.S.) had a close friend and colleague, a Spaniard, who would go off to an intensive language summer school thing every year to teach American college students whatever esoteric Spanish literature was his specialty and only spoke Spanish the entire time.
Whenever he got back, he would spontaneously start talking to us in Spanish, suddenly realized we didn't speak Spanish, then restart again in English. It didn't embarrass him or anything, but it amused me when he did it.
Oh man this happens to my mom all the time, in both languages too. She'll speak English to people in mexico and Spanish to people in Canada. Cracks me up every time, but sucks when we're trying to pass as locals in mexico.
I had a similar experience when I was learning English where I was trying to give something to my friend, eventually I realized I was just repeating a number (10) at her. Ten means "take this" in spanish.
Another friend once thought twat was a synonym of twit. First time she called someone a twat in my presence I was gobsmacked but thought I must have misheard; there was definitely nothing twattish going on.
The next time it happened I made a note to raise it privately with her later. "You do know what twat means don't you?" "Yeah, it's another word for twit." "Er, no."
Aren't they both insults though? Am I confused about what twit means
Twit is a light hearted jibe, much like calling someone a muppet or a dingbat. It's not a word you would use if you really wanted to insult them.
twat in american is a far harsher word than in englisj
A twit is kind of like an idiot or a nitwit.
I was selling a TV to a guy who barely spoke English. The TV was $50. He said "I only have fifteen monies". Idk why, but that was so hilarious to me that I let him have the TV for fifteen monies.
I am an English monoglot. Years ago, was working overseas in Kuwait when I experienced a sudden onset of testicular pain and swelling. Went to the hospital and got taken to an elderly Arabic ultrasound technician to examine my junk. After a few minutes of smearing cold jelly on me, he says something...in Arabic.
I do not understand.
He repeats it, this time poking me in the fupa.
I look confused and try to adjust my position on the table to give him better access, hoping this is what he wants.
He sighs, searching for the little English he knows. Finally he says, "Like pooping...but not pooping!" and wags his finger in my face. That's how I understood he wanted me to tense my lower abdominal wall so he could check for a hernia.
To be fair, most English speakers probably wouldn't know what to do if you told them the term in English, the Valsalva maneuver.
Sorry I don't know how to dance the salsa.
Polish word for "searching" - "szukanie" - means "fucking" (the performance thereof) in Slovak language. This becomes a topic - and a source of amusement and confusion - almost every time people from these countries meet together, because how often these words are used.
I once tried to say “I don’t fuck about” in Italian to my Italian friend. I ran it through DDG and replied to him with something along the lines of “Non cazzetto”.
He was a little surprised that I’d admitted to him that I don’t fuck, but treated me with sympathy all the same.
I've had a few weird exchanges with my wife, although we both are native french speakers.
Turns out the word we use in Switzerland for prune (the fruit) is only used for the dried version of the same fruit in France. Perfect set up for a strange conversation about baking until we found out.
I enjoyed this because it took me a second to think what a not-dried prune is: a plum.
Ah! You know what? I looked for a translation of the damned word... without trying to translate the word for plum, as it is obviously the same word in my head 😅
Thank you for letting me know 😂
I've never had that sort of thing while personally interacting with people who speak other languages. However, when deployed I used to hear people speaking other languages regularly. So it wasn't that they were communicating directly with me, but I used to love overhearing what they were saying and "bad translating" it to english. And that was hilarious.
Asking for a specific dish at a restaurant in Japan whose name was also the name of that very dish. They thought we were asking if we were at the right place, but we were actually just trying to order some. Or vice versa, I can't quite remember.
I think it was anagomwshi, on Miyajima island
I was snowboarding with some French exchange students. They used a lot of slang. On the chair lift we saw somebody fall hard and flat, what we might call a “yard sale”. One of them said “Quelle bordelle”. I asked what it means he said “what a mess”. Later that year, my parents also had a French exchange student, and his parents were visiting and they didn’t speak much English. We were at the beach and I was describing all the seaweed from the storm and of course it’s a mess on the beach. His mom was a bit puzzled when I described the seaweed as resembling a brothel. You know, a mess, like trash, refuse, rubbish.
And if it's really bad, it'd be "putain de bordelle merde", or so I've been told.
It was me who did a dumb recently. Talking to a cellist, in English: "Oh, you're a striker?".
Sounds like you don't know shit. (Standup comedy >4min)
Also your comment made me think of Jimmy Yang, who apparently knew English when he moved to the US, but not that well, not knowing any expressions. When someone asked him "what's up", he just looked at the ceiling.
As a kid we giggled at "Disney Home Video" because "Disney" is a proper noun, so doesn't translate, and "video" is "video" in Finnish as well, but "home" means "mould", (as in the fungus.)
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
I mentioned once giving a person of the female persuasion a wide berth (meaning to avoid that person. I can't remember why, maybe she was particularly annoying or something).
My friends face made me realise he didn't know that particular word and couldn't work out what a wide birth was.
About 20 years ago I spent the year after high school in Europe. Went backpacking to Italy with friends, one of whom was absurdly handsome, not all that bright and quite forward.
Well, in Rome we met a group of pretty girls who spoke no English but with sign language and a phrase book we figured they were visiting Rome as part of their high school graduation fun. Got a number and promised to meet them in Naples.
Fast forward, we arrive in the evening in Naples with no plan or place to stay hoping to connect with these girls.
We find a payphone, handsome fella grabs it and starts dialing. And then we hear:
"Uhhhh. Ci? Is... Uhhh. Shit. Is your daughter there? Your daughter? Hot daughter? Phone? Fuck. IS YOUR DAUGHTER THERE? I'm the guy from Rome? FUCK!"
A student was telling me about their pet dog, but it sounded like "duck." I kept asking questions like, "how did you get a duck? Your parents bought you a duck?" They couldn't tell the difference between what I was saying either. They showed me a picture and that cleared right up.
A work colleague on a few occasions has mixed up “ball handling” and “hand-balling”, easily done if English isn’t your first language!
How much hand-balling are y'all doing over there?
I was on a voice call with a friend, and people who are familiar with me know that I'll end specific sentences with "eh" when others would use "yeah" or "you know?" instead. For example, "How times have changed, eh?" and "How'd your assignment go eh?"
They took it to mean "what?" or "pardon?" each time, and they asked me if I was confused, and I explained what it meant to them. It was funny in the sense that I assumed people knew what it meant but then I realized some people might actually find it confusing!
Drag got used to this as a kid playing Animal Crossing. Blathers keeps on saying wot at the end of half his sentences. Drag supposes some people just like to sound confused.
I've made this mistake and apparently others have as well: the words for lips (kuchibiru) and nipple (chikubi) got mixed up in my head leading to some awkwardness in Japanese.
Apparently roasted corn is funny in Spanish. 🤪
An opposite thing happened to me.
Wanted to trade something online. The other party listed trade as currency for object or other object + currency for object.
I had the other object and thought they would pay me the currency and their object for mine. It took a while for me to understand what they were waiting for.
They seemed to be a native English speaker. It's a second language for me, so some meanings get lost in translation.
I can't think of one off hand, but yours (E: and several of the replies) made me lol, thanks 😂
Glad to hear!
I was surprised that my Japanese online friend couldn't differentiate sit and shit... sorry
