# Embarrasing attempts at speaking other languages... **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [November 1, 2004, 2:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/embarrasing-attempts-at-speaking-other-languages/272323 "2004-11-01T14:14:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Martha\_Medea](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/43a26b/32.png) [@Martha\_Medea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martha_Medea)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2004, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/embarrasing-attempts-at-speaking-other-languages/272323/61 "2004-11-03T18:24:26Z")
‘False friends’ like embarrassed/embarazada are the bane of any language learner’s life. All related languages like English and Spanish and French have them. I know people who have made the embarazada gaffe, like a friend who told a Spanish woman that he hoped she was not pregnant as a result of his actions, which must have baffled her seeing as they had just met and hadn’t left the restaurant, let alone engaged in any activity that could have led to such a condition. Sometimes it’s a struggle for me to ressurect my high-school French, and I can’t avoid saying things like ‘hope’ for ‘wait’ (‘espoir’ in French, ‘esperar’ in Spanish). This [site](http://spanish.about.com/cs/vocabulary/a/obviouswrong.htm) has a list in Spanish, and here’s [another](http://french.about.com/library/fauxamis/blfauxam.htm) for French. ---
**Author:** ![badomen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/c2a13f/32.png) [@badomen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/badomen)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2004, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/embarrasing-attempts-at-speaking-other-languages/272323/62 "2004-11-03T19:28:07Z")
A friend of mine was teaching English in Japan, and had been living there a while. The students needed to get up and read a paragraph they had written in English to the whole class. One girl in his class was rather nervous about this prospect. When it was her turn to read she was a bit hesitant, and my friend tried to comfort her by saying “Don’t be nervous” in Japanese - however, he got 2 unfortunately very similar words confused - the word for being nervous and the word for inserting an object like a suppository. So basically, he told the girl “Don’t shove it up your ass.” The class laughed and she wasn’t really nervous after that. ---
**Author:** ![Sleel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/73ab20/32.png) [@Sleel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sleel)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2004, 6:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/embarrasing-attempts-at-speaking-other-languages/272323/63 "2004-11-04T06:23:30Z")
I’ve got a few, one that happened to me and some that happened to people I know. Japanese has great potential for mistakes because there are relatively few sounds compared to other languages. Even native speakers sketch _kanji_ in the air for words that sound alike if they want to avoid confusion. Along with words that sound **exactly** alike there are plenty of words that differ by a single vowel, or even worse, differ only in the length of the vowel sound or a change in pitch. English doesn’t pay any attention to duration or pitch so native English speakers screw up the words that depend on these differences quite often. Most of the time it doesn’t matter since you can get it from context. The difference between the edge of a cliff, bridge, and chopsticks is pretty easy to figure out, for example. I was with a Japanese friend of mine late one night when he called his mother. It was an abnormally short conversation. I said, “_Okashita no?_” He was shocked and angry, and was very close to yelling at me when he said, “Why would you say something like that?! What’s wrong with you.” I should have said _Okoshita no?_ which means, “Did you wake [her] up?” _Okashita no?_ means “Did you rape [her]?” I’d never even heard that word before so I had no idea what I’d accidentally said until we sorted things out. My friend had been in Japan for about a year or two and had learned Japanese basically on the job with no formal instruction. There was a teacher he worked with who he thought was cute, so he kept trying to make nice comments and flirt with her. One day that backfired. She was wearing a shirt with some kind of cartoon character on it. He, trying to be nice, complemented her on her nice _manko_. _Manga_ means “cartoon.” _Manko_ means something close to “cunt,” but a bit nastier. I’ve also heard from the rumor mill that one girl called her Japanese friend because she was having trouble making her curry sauce (_karê_) thick enough. Her friend gave her several points of advice, including putting on lipstick, getting naked, and touching the sauce “down there” before the poor girl understood that what she’d actually been saying was that she couldn’t make her boyfriend hard (_kare wa kataku naranai_). One of my friends used to play practical jokes on people who thought they knew Japanese but really had only a basic understanding. He told them that in his area the regional dialect rendered _genki desu ka_ (lit.: are you healthy? [how are you?]) as _benpi desu ka_ (are you constipated?) The last blooper I’d like to relate is not from someone I met, I read it somewhere, but the story stuck in my head and it fits this topic perfectly. A young woman had just graduated from college and took a job teaching English in Spain. She was teaching a class of late-teens to early-twenties men who had only a passing interest in learning. During her self-introduction she started trying to translate what she was saying because they didn’t seem to understand her English very well. Everything went fine until she translated “I have a rabbit” as _“Tengo un conejo”_ (I have a pussy). They seemed a lot more interested in the class after that. ---
**Author:** ![Kiminy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Kiminy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kiminy)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2004, 6:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/embarrasing-attempts-at-speaking-other-languages/272323/64 "2004-11-04T06:45:51Z")
> [@matt\_mcl](#): > > One evil thing about basic French dictionaries is that they don’t include dirty words. Not so you can use them, but so you can avoid them. The biggest problem is that they all say that the verb _baiser_ means “to kiss.” It did about 300 years ago; now it means _only_ “to fuck” (although “un baiser” is still a kiss; a fuck is “une baise.” To kiss is _embrasser_.) > > Every English-speaking learner of French makes that mistake… _one_ time. Fortunately I did with a French exchange student around my age as opposed to, say, a sweet little old lady. In a former life, I taught French to poor, unsuspecting American college students. One of the short stories they had to read for my class used the noun “un baiser”, which is a perfectly innocent word meaning “a kiss.” Elsewhere in the same story is found the verb “baisser” (pronounced with an /s/ sound in the middle), which means “to lower” or to bring to a lower level. I made great pains to explain the difference between “un baiser” and the verb “baiser” (notice that there is only one S in this word!), and to drive the point home, I actually said in class that the verb “baiser” (with a single s pronounced like a /z/) meant “to fuck”. That’s really the only point in my life that I have actually said this word out loud (in either language), but the impact of having a teacher use the F-word during class made it stand out significantly in their minds. ---
**Author:** ![Sublight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/439d5e/32.png) [@Sublight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sublight)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2004, 7:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/embarrasing-attempts-at-speaking-other-languages/272323/65 "2004-11-04T07:00:21Z")
> [@badomen](#): > > When it was her turn to read she was a bit hesitant, and my friend tried to comfort her by saying “Don’t be nervous” in Japanese - however, he got 2 unfortunately very similar words confused - the word for being nervous and the word for inserting an object like a suppository. > > So basically, he told the girl “Don’t shove it up your ass.” Sounds like he mixed up _kinchou_ (nervous) and _kanchou_ (enema). Back when he just started as a teacher, an acquaintence of mine wanted to tell his boss’s wife that he was having trouble understanding the extremely formal Japanese she always used. _Teinei na nihongo ga wakarimasen_ - “I don’t understand formal Japanese” _ **Teme** na nihongo ga wakarimasen_ - “I don’t understand your Japanese, bitch.” Luckily, another co-worker was standing nearby and realized what he was trying to say, rescuing him from disaster. And my wife pronounces “I’ll go take a seat” as “I’ll go take a shit” so frequently that I don’t even blink at it anymore. ---
**Author:** ![Bites\_When\_Provoked](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bites_when_provoked/32/18073_2.png) [@Bites\_When\_Provoked](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bites_When_Provoked)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2004, 8:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/embarrasing-attempts-at-speaking-other-languages/272323/66 "2004-11-04T08:14:23Z")
> [@ouryL](#): > > A friend of mine was suffering for translation fatigue and told the Germab couple he was staying with, “Ich werde heute abend verrücktkommen” instead of “Ich werde heute abend zurückkommen”. This’d probably be a lot funnier if there was a complete translation. I know you translated two of the words in your next post, but I for one have no idea what the rest of the sentence means… It may well be translated elsewhere on the page, but I can’t see it. I am, however, pretty tired at the moment so if I’ve overlooked it, can some kind person please let me know the post #? Cheers. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Catalyst](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e47774/32.png) [@Catalyst](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Catalyst)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2004, 8:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/embarrasing-attempts-at-speaking-other-languages/272323/67 "2004-11-04T08:52:47Z")
> [@Khiadra](#): > > This’d probably be a lot funnier if there was a complete translation. I know you translated two of the words in your next post, but I for one have no idea what the rest of the sentence means… > > It may well be translated elsewhere on the page, but I can’t see it. I am, however, pretty tired at the moment so if I’ve overlooked it, can some kind person please let me know the post #? Cheers. 🙂 Intended sentence: “I will return this evening.” Came out as: “I will go crazy this evening.” Well, kinda; _verrückt_ (crazy) and _kommen_ (to come) wouldn’t normally go together (at least, nobody’s used that particular compound word in any site searched by Google). ---
**Author:** ![matt\_mcl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ab992/32.png) [@matt\_mcl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/matt_mcl)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2004, 9:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/embarrasing-attempts-at-speaking-other-languages/272323/68 "2004-11-04T09:40:43Z")
Also, all students of French should be aware that three words, distinguished only by very similar vowels, refer to _completely different_ parts of the body: _Le cou_ (/ku/ – rhymes with “who”) is the neck; _Le cul_ (/kü/ – doesn’t rhyme with “who”; has that fucked-up “u” that English-speaking beginning students of French totally hate) is the ass; _La queue_ (/kö/ – rhymes with “fur” as pronounced by a Briton, more or less) is the dick. You must be VERY CAREFUL with these. Especially in, ahhh, intimate moments. I had a French-Canadian boyfriend when I still didn’t quite speak it fluently; hilarity often resulted. ---
**Author:** ![OtakuLoki](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/ac8455/32.png) [@OtakuLoki](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OtakuLoki)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2004, 9:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/embarrasing-attempts-at-speaking-other-languages/272323/69 "2004-11-04T09:50:50Z")
I just remembered one of these. We were going on a school trip to France, and going through customs just behind my friend Peter. The customs official looked at the passport and sniggered. Fortunately, Pete didn’t notice. I did find out later what happened. Peter is the verb meaning ‘to fart.’ Poor guy. ---
**Author:** ![Iceland\_Blue](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/4bbf92/32.png) [@Iceland\_Blue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Iceland_Blue)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2004, 10:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/embarrasing-attempts-at-speaking-other-languages/272323/70 "2004-11-04T10:16:05Z")
This may be urban legend,but apparently there was a high-powered executive who could travel anywhere on business except Spanish speaking countries as his name was Mr. C.O.Jones (cojones=testicles in Spanish :D) ---
**Author:** ![Martha\_Medea](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/43a26b/32.png) [@Martha\_Medea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martha_Medea)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2004, 12:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/embarrasing-attempts-at-speaking-other-languages/272323/71 "2004-11-04T12:56:43Z")
Female English teacher in Spain, taking her jacket off in a sweltering classroom: “¡Estoy caliente!” Class: 😃😃😃 “Estoy caliente”, literally “I’m hot” as in “I’ve got the hots”. She should have said “Tengo calor”. Mr C. O. Jones was a frequent letter-writer to the daily paper at home, until someone finally noticed. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/embarrasing-attempts-at-speaking-other-languages/272323.md?page=3)