This thread is excellent. Secretly knowing a language is like a superpower.
Yeah, only almost every day in Japan. Not many of them have lead to satisfactory results unfortunately.
Like the time I went shopping in a major department store with my wife, and we were looking for a new coat for me. When we stop at a particular rack to have a look at some items on sale, a senior sales staff guy approaches us and asks how he can help us (in Japanese). I start up and tell him what kind of coat I’m looking for and what color and fabric. He’s listening, but still facing my wife and then replies to her only, not even looking at me. Repeat this for the next 15 or 20 minutes or so, while we’re trying on different coats, my wife hasn’t said much so it’s basically me and the salesman talking, but he hasn’t looked at me yet. Mind you, I’m not surprised by this at all - happens all the time.
Eventually I find a coat I like give him my card and ask him to wrap it and ring it. While he’s gone I ask the wife to take off for a while and meet me later somewhere else. When the salesman comes back and finds me wifeless, he starts to panic (face quivering) and head spinning around looking for her. Then he tries to speak to me in very broken English.
Dude, wake the fuck up - we’ve been talking for a while already, what the hell is wrong with you?
Happened pretty much evry day for about 25 years living in china.
Still happens a lot since I work in a very international company.
This happens all the time in Korea - I’m Korean, so no one assumes I’m fluent in English. Taking public transport is always amusing when you have foreigners (and even Korean Americans) talking loudly in English about how Korea sucks or how that person is ugly . . . I’ve been tempted a few times to say something but I hate causing scenes.
The assumption baffles me. English is now a widely spoken language. It’s stupid to assume that absolutely no one in that bus or subway is going to be able to understand you.
In my family there’s a saying: “Hungarian is the most dangerous language in the world.” That’s because everyone thinks it’s very obscure, but more people speak it than you think.
Case in point: One of my cousins was born in Hungary but moved to the U.S. as a young child. Some years later she was about twelve years old and living in Cincinnati. She was in a shopping mall with her mother and said, in Hungarian, “Isn’t that the fattest, ugliest woman you ever saw in your whole life?”
You guessed it – the woman understood Hungarian.
Ogre, what was the point of the german officer ordering in german in the expectation that you didn’t understand the language? All that would have happened is that the airmen would have to waste time repeating their orders in english as I’m sure not all of them were fluent in german. I could understand the predicament if this scenario took place on a base in Germany and you couldn’t speak the language; then the german officer would be justified in feeling superior to you.
I went to France with my half Japanese children (who were blonde at the time, their hair has darkened now) to visit our French/Dutch friends who had just moved back. Their fully French/Dutch white-blonde seven year old had lived all her life in Japan, as had our kids.
We went to a chateau to look around, and in one hallway came across a group of lost Japanese ladies looking for the toilet. Without missing a beat, the daughter of our friends turned to them and said in perfect Japanese “The toilets? Oh, they are down that way, we just passed them” and wandered off again. Only I saw the thunderstruck faces on the ladies, as our kids don’t think its any big deal to speak multiple languages!
I’ve also been guilty of doing it. Year ago, a group of friends and I went to Kobe for a conference. We were sitting on the portliner lateish at night, chatting. There was one other passenger in the train, a salariman reading the newspaper. We got talking about our taste in men, and it got a bit raunchy, though thank goodness our general conclusion was that we liked Japanese guys. After a good long while, the train stopped and the newspaper reading man stood up, turned to us and in a perfect British accent said “Thank you ladies, that was entertaining and enlightening” bowed to us, and stepped off the train!
This wasn’t me, but I witnessed it first-hand and got a kick out of it.
I worked at Best Buy about 10 years ago.
While I was working the register one day, a Korean family came up to check out a computer. I rang them up, gave them the total. Out of the blue, they started screaming at me, saying that I was trying to cheat them, that the salesperson had told them it was much cheaper, etc.
I honestly had no clue. Maybe they were right? The salesperson had ducked out. I picked up the phone to call the manager. The family began speaking to one another in Korean, which I don’t speak.
The manager came to my register. The family didn’t notice him, or assumed he wasn’t a manager (we were both wearing the similar Best Buy outfit at the time - khaki pants, blue polo.) He listened to them speak amongst themselves for a minute or two, then quietly addressed the family. He spoke maybe two sentences in Korean and then just folded his arms.
The matriarch of the family turned bright red. Handed me the credit card, paid the initial charge. The family left looking a little embarrassed.
Naturally, I was curious so I asked my manager what was going on.
“Oh, they were talking about how if they made a scene we might be intimidated enough give them a discount. Of course that doesn’t really work when they say that out loud to each other.”
“You speak Korean?”
“A little. I was stationed there for a few years when I was in the Marines, I picked up enough.”
“Nice, boss.”
I don’t speak Chinese, but when I lived there, I did quite well learning it and especially listening to it.
Hard to judge them, but I could often hear Chinese people talking about me and my wife. They usually weren’t saying negative things, actually. They assumed we are super rich since we were Americans and tried to screw us on prices.
My brother went on a brief 2-week cultural exchange program to a small town outside Hamburg in high school and came back knowing maybe 5 words of German because his host family had spoken to him exclusively in English the entire time he was there.
One I forgot: my mom, who is nearly fluent in German, was in a bookstore in Vienna last summer looking for a historical book about the area. She chatted with the shopkeeper in German for a couple minutes as she was browsing, then found a book she liked (in English) and brought it to the counter to pay. He said, “Oh, you know this book is in English? We have it in German, I can find it for you.” She switched to English and said, “No, thank you, I’m American, the English version will be fine.” The shopkeeper was flabbergasted. My mom said it made her entire week to have fooled him like that.
My sister is a blonde, blue-eyed American. She used to live in Turkey and is fluent in Turkish. She was undergoing breast cancer treatment in Phoenix and the radiation guy had a Turkish surname. She asked him in Turkish where he was from and he was floored. She also used to tour-guide in Istanbul when she lived there, mostly for Ge3rman and American tourists. The beggers/street vendors used to try to harass her groups, but realized that she spoke Turkey and would yell at them. In fact, she was once walking in a market and some teenager goosed her. She turned around and yelled at him in Turkish, and local people started mobbing to attack this kid who touched a woman inappropriately. She said she was afraid they’d kill him.
StG
It’s simple. They were out for a night on the town, weren’t in any hurry, and were fucking with me.
Ok, maybe I should share a funny story. My wife, who is Chinese, and I went to the Loire Valley in France. The locals would speak to me in French, which I studied for 2 pathetic years in high school 2 decades before, and my wife, who had studied a year or so at Alliance Francais, would answer them. Then my wife and I would speak in Chinese, and then she would translate to french. The locals were going WTF???
The reverse happens to me from time to time, where tourists asking me for help are very impressed by my English. I suppress the urge to say, “Thank you! I learned English from a program called Hooked On Phonics. Are you familiar with it?” and simply smile and say that I’m an English speaker, like many Montrealers.
Some time ago, as part of a translation class, I did a research project on queer language and was researching a British queer lect called Polari, which is a remarkable variety in which English is heavily larded with, uniquely, lots of non-English terms as well as certain grammatical characters. (This is unique because most queer varieties purely involve semantic changes to English words and don’t tend to have unusual grammatical features.) Polari derived from Cant, an underworld variety that later spread to the theatre and thence out into the gay world. Cant, in turn, was derived from Lingua Franca, a sailors’ language with primarily Romance origins. Accordingly, a lot of Polari sounds much like Mediterranean Romance languages: the name, for example, is a relative of parlare, Italian for “to speak.” So the story was that two English gay guys were on holiday in Italy in the 50s and were speaking Polari to each other, when suddenly, to their great embarrassment, it came to their attention that everyone could understand them.
I lived in Indonesia back in the early 80s. While there, I took a six week crash course in Indonesian and got a good understanding of the language. It was soooo much fun to go into the markets, buy something and start haggling over the price in English. Everyone there spoke a little English, so I could do that. After we haggled for a while, I’d switch to Bahasa Indonesia and they would go apeshit over the fact that I could speak their language. Then the haggling started for real.
I’d also get my expat buds in trouble as well. One evening, I got talked into going to a bar with them and my boss. Of course, the bar girls were all over us 30 seconds after we got a table. I was chatting one of the girls up and just for grins, told her that my boss liked to kiss boys, not girls. A few minutes later, all the girls had moved away from him and the guys had moved in. Hilarity then ensued, especially after I told them that I was joking.
Huh. Never heard of it, per se, but looking over the glossary on Wikipedia, I’m amazed at how much Polari I’m familiar with indirectly, and how much is out there that I never knew was Polari. Learn something new every day.
I grew up in Colorado, speaking English, and only learned Spanish over the last 15 years or so after having moved to a region really close to Mexico. I get complimented on a regular basis by “Winter Texans” for my un-accented English. Guess I don’t look gringo enough for the folks from Quebec 
Understand <> speak.
In German I can’t speak my way out of a paper bag. But I understand quite a lot, and I’ve had quite a few cases of people dissing someone else / the boss / a coworker in front of me, thinking that I wouldn’t know. A specific couple of idiots who liked to do this even had to speak a bit slower and more “neutral-dialect” than usual to each other, making it even easier for me to understand. Mind you: things like “Das Direktor ist an idiot” don’t exactly require an ability to read Goethe in the original, to be able to understand them…
I’ve mentioned before the curious phenomenon of people who know I speak Catalan, we’ve spoken in Catalan before, actually we’ve only spoken in Catalan, but then one day they hear my lastname and ask where is it from, or hear me speak Spanish with a very-non-Catalan accent… and suddenly start adressing me only in Spanish and being thrown off-kilter if I answer in Catalan. What gets me is that Catalonia has been an immigration area for over 200 years, it’s not like they never get anybody born “outside” who went there and learned the language 
This is sort of the opposite. I don’t speak Basque (for family-history reasons, and despite being from a blinigual Spanish-Basque area); I know a few words, some very basic grammar structures, but can’t even remember how to say “hello” half the time, I know how to say “thank you” but can’t seem to learn “you’re welcome” despite having asked for it a dozen times. I worked for a year with a team where most people were Basque-speakers, two of them as first-language, all of them bilingual since preschool. Sometimes the ones with Basque as first-language would slip a line in Basque in the middle of Spanish or English, or a line which was Spanish/English words and Basque grammar, and the audience would go “uh?” - and I’d translate. And then one of the other bilinguals would up the Basque accent and say “good thing she don’t speak Basque, this one! For not speaking Basque, she don’t understand it half bad.”
Another one:
Years ago I was based in Philadelphia, working on a big IT project and travelling a lot. One of those trips was to Houston. The EHS manager of a small factory (whom I’d known for months) took me on a tour of the facilities and introduced me to the people we met as “the engineer from Philadelphia who’s in charge of preparing SAP for us”. There were four guys in the Production Control cabin. One of them pointed to the SCADA’s monitor, called the others over and, in the tone of someone stating “we’ll have to clean that line soon”, made an observation about the quality of gringa ass - and got “de parte de mi madre, gracias” (thank you on Mom’s behalf [as my ass is her handiwork, thus it was her work he was praising]). After they all finished sputtering and the manager picked himself up from the floor, we explained that I’m from Spain. The EHS manager was surprised that I had not been surprised, I explained that I knew him thank you much and I’d realized he had been very careful not to say my name - figured he was up to something The workers asked him to see if he could hire me once the project was over, as “she already speaks both our languages!”
Yep, happens to me on a daily basis. Today I got:
“Look at that white guy…damn, he’s so white. His nose is so big! He’s so short, I thought foreigners were tall…”
“Be quiet.”
“What? He doesn’t understand what I’m saying. Where do you think he’s from?”
“Italy, maybe.”
:::I roll my eyes at them:::
“OMG, do you think he knows what we’re saying?”
“No, of course not. Foreigners don’t speak Chinese.”
:::I turn to them:::
“Do you have anything else you want to say? Huh? Maybe you should just shut up now.”
:::they turn white as sheets and slink away:::
It should be noted, though, that the Chinese offer some very blunt observations about weight, looks, and other things out loud and but it’s not considered rude. “Wow, she’s really fat,” for example, isn’t an insult to them like it would be in the West.