Ever have someone assume you didn't speak their language when you did?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

My parents were born in Latvia so I speak Latvian fluently. Knowing a really obscure language is helpful when you want to speak about private matters in public but one must always be careful.

My favorite story is the time I was at Charles de Gaulle airport. I was waiting for a friend coming in on a flight from Detroit. A young woman near me was talking on a cell phone in Latvian. Normally I would approach a person because Latvian society is quite small and I know that we would have common friends or even family. For some reason I didn’t talk to her - I just listened.

She was obviously talking to the person who had got off the same flight as my friend - she was saying things like, “okay, it will take you awhile to get your bags and I’m at exit number 7, I can’t wait to see you, only a few more minutes my love”, etc.

Who comes through the exit but the father of one of my friends. The woman was not his wife. I hid behind a post so he wouldn’t see me while he kissed his lady-friend. I never told anybody about it.

Another time I was on the DC metro and an elderly Latvian couple was having a fight. Well, the woman was berating her husband in a terrible way and he was saying some pretty mean things back to her. At one point I snickered after a good one-liner and they both stopped to look at me. Luckily I got off at the next stop and never said anything to them either.

My sister speaks six languages fluently and it’s always amazing to go out with her because she can understand practically everyone. You’d never guess.

82

Retired from the US Navy in Spain, and was hired to lead a team of Spanish technicians on a construction job. Introduced to a Brit foreman who was haviing troubles wiring some safety devices my crew would help him with. He dragged me and #2 to meet his crew, saying “This is Brad and Javi, they are going to help with the project. Don’t worry, though Brad speaks pretty good English.”
From the back of the crew someone piped up (had met me in a local pub) “he ought to, he’s a bloody Yank!”
Their foremen turned red, coughed and said “well, you get on with it then.” And left.
Dined out for months.

83

I do this all the time. That’s the primary way for me to collect gossip at work. Unfortunately, most people at work, know that I speak Japanese now so the information has dried up.

A couple of incidents that were memorable:
I was having dinner with a very Irish looking friend, when the salarymen at the next table were talking about how hot she was looking. Nothing crude, just admiring the red hair. Since both of us could understand Japanese, we had a tough time keeping our faces serious. We were both hoping for something more, at which point we could have chimed in, but they left soon after.

When I joined my current company, I had a discussion with the HR about some stuff during which I was speaking only in English. (Hell, it was even in my resume that I speak Japanese, but I doubt if they got to that part) They were talking among themselves about some financial details, which I later used for awesome bargaining. At the end of the meeting, I said goodbye in extra formal Japanese just to see the look on their faces :slight_smile:

84

Sitting in a restaurant in Paris some years ago we were seated near an elderly British couple. For some strange reason, the man spoke to the his female companion in French and she would respond in German. As it happens, I’m tolerably fluent in French and my wife in German, so we soon realized that they were making disparaging remarks about us and trying to hide it. We decided not to let on though, as we found the whole situation hilarious. Even funnier was our conversation with the waiter (and this was an establishment with a “professional” waiter, a middle-aged gentleman with normally impeccable manners) after they left. Apparently they’d been rather rude about him too in English, a language he spoke perfectly.

On a separate note my wife also seems to be very good at guessing topics of discussion in languages she doesn’t understand, just by context and body language. She once interrupted a conversation between two Urdu-speaking programmers with the answer to the question they were debating and recently gave correct directions to a lost-looking Chinese couple who were arguing. I don’t know how she does it but the expressions are priceless.

85

The important thing was that I had an onion tied to my belt, which was the style at the time. You couldn’t get white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.

86

Not so much the understanding part, but our wedding photos were fun.

Taken in Indonesian, the boss only spoke Indonesian, our guide (my wife’s aunt) Indonesian and Cantonese, me only english. So a price would be quoted in Indonesian, translated to Cantonese and then related to me in English. Best thing was, with the price in English would come instructions on what expression I should have :slight_smile:

Joy all around. And we got a really really good price

87

Happens to me all the time. I think my favorite was when I worked at Immigration Court, there was an office of Lockheed down the hall. Two Russian-speaking female engineers who worked there were in the common hallway bathroom most mornings, with one of them trashing her husband in great detail to the other, usually recounting whatever his latest transgressions were (I remember one episode involved pink lipstick on his collar early one morning when he came home reeking of cheap vodka).

I worked there for three and a half years, and never had the heart to tell them I understood everything they were saying.

88

Not quite the same as the OP but…

I once worked in a large lab with several Chinese scientists, one French, one German, and a couple of Spaniards. English was rarely spoken around me. But all the science words were English, so I could often follow the thread of a conversation no matter what language it was in.

Once one of the Chinese scientists, pregnant at the time, was angry at her husband (who also worked in the lab) because he had left something toxic unlabelled on the lab bench and exposed her to it. She was giving him absolute hell in Chinese. He was apologizing profusely. Some things don’t need translation : )

89

I was serving some tourists from France who started making smart ass remarks to themselves about how I looked like Elvis in a derogatory way in French amongst themselves. I rang them up at the cash in French (instant silence, no eye contact) and said Thank you very much in my best Elvis impersantion as they left.

mange la merde oisti gang de cav.

90

Yeah, just last week. Some drunk Japanese tourists on the subway made the mistake of assuming that no one around them would be able to understand their language while they made fun of everyone in their proximity. The look of horror on their faces when I interrupted one of them and said “I can understand you, bitch” in perfect Japanese was just priceless.

91

Sometimes that’s the most merciful thing to do. (Not in the case of obnoxious tourists, however.)

92

How’d you say “bitch”? I probably would’ve gone with “Oi, urusei!” myself. :slight_smile:

93

I’ve been in situations where I’ve spoken some broken Spanish, telling them that I understand more than I speak, and gotten in English “why don’t you speak Spanish?” It happens, I tried, I’m not fluent, but nobody’s perfect. :wink: Because of those situations, I had to learn phrases to identify my ethnicity-- sometimes it was assumed I was a native Spanish speaker from Latin America because of the pronunciation.

When I first started working at my current job, I kept encountering international students who’d speak to each other in their language (be it French, German, or Danish), assuming I didn’t understand a word. I informed the Danish kids that I understood what they were talking about, but that I was probably the only one, and introduced myself as an Icelander. “Your Icelandic sounds funny” tends to be my cross-Scandinavian language commentary if I can understand more of their dialect than I should.

94

This attitude is there not just regarding obvious (Euro or African) “lao wai” (foreigners), but even other neighboring Asian countries or (for some of the major dialects) other parts of China. Here is my all time favorite story in this vein - it happened to a friend of my father.

Background: my parents and their friends are all from a generation born in China in the mid to late 1930s, and grew up in wartime strife - war with Japan, and then the Nationalist/Communist civil war. Most of them spent the first 10-15 years of their life fleeing from one part of China to another, finally ending up in Taiwan and then emigrating to the US in the late 1960s as grad students who then stayed and became citizens. As a result, most of them can speak or understand four major and mutually unintelligible dialects of Chinese - Mandarin, Cantonese, the Shanghai dialect, and Taiwanese.

After retiring in the early 1990s, this friend took on a part-time job as a contingency driver for a car service. He didn’t do it every day, but he’d be on call for airport pickups and the like in case they got really busy and needed to handle “overflow” (he owned his own car suitable for the task, like a Lincoln Continental or something).

One day he picked up a businessman arriving from Shanghai, maybe in his early 30s, with a pretty young woman on his arm at the airport. As he loaded the luggage into the trunk, the man gave him that scrutinizing “what kind of Asian are you” look, before asking him in English: “Are you Korean?”

Among Asians from Asia it is not considered particularly offensive to ask a stranger something like this any more than it would be to ask about their religion, weight or if they have diabetes (really, a lot people don’t think twice about it), but having been in the US for so long it bugged him. So he said, “Yes, I’m Korean”. And as they got into the car and drove off, he listened to them conversing in Mandarin.

Woman: What did you say to him? [Evidently she didn’t speak English.]
Man: I asked if he was Korean.
Woman: Is he Korean? Maybe, I couldn’t really tell.
Man: Oh, I could tell right away. Just look at him! That big nose, beady little eyes, a face that’s neither round nor square… (they both laugh)

A little while later the woman fished for something in her purse and dropped it on the floor. Our friend asked in Mandarin, “Do you want me to turn on the cabin light?” Dead silence. Then, in English, the businessman said accusingly: “Aren’t you Korean?” Followed by Mandarin, “How is it that you speak Chinese?” The friend gave him some story about being bilingual in Korean and Chinese from growing up near the border with family on both sides. (Which is certainly possible - I’ve met a few people like this.)

You might think the people in the back seat were put in their place from this, or learned some kind of lesson, but no. The man instead switched to using the Shanghai dialect to start talking about how rude the driver was for pulling a stunt like that on them. Our friend inserted himself into that conversation too, pointing out that he hadn’t said anything rude, even when they were talking about his face, just trying to help them out.

The rest of the ride went in total silence. I don’t know if they tipped him or not but gaining the story is what he valued out of the experience.

95

I love this story.

96

Just thougth of another situation. My former boyfriend was born and raised in Venezuela, but he is very eastern European looking, since his mom and dad are from the Czech Republic. He speaks Spanish, English and Czech. I am a native English speaker, but I took 3 years of Spanish in school, and my boyfriend taught me a lot, so I can get by pretty well with Spanish, although my accent is not always perfect.

One day, I was meeting him at a coffee shop and I got there early. Sitting next to me were two gay guys, chatting away in Spanish. They seemed very friendly and I decided to chat with them in Spanish. They asked me to repeat a lot of things and claimed they couldn’t understand me, so we switched to English. A few minutes later, my boyfriend came in and I introduced him to my new “friends” in Spanish, and we all conversed in Spanish for a few minutes. Suddenly, they could understand what I was saying (in Spanish). I’m not sure, but I suspect that perhaps they resented that a lily white guy with a southern (English) accent was able to speak Spanish.

Another time, a friend of mine went to Quebec with his family for a family vacation. He was about 15 or so at the time, and had taken two years of French in school and had a reasonable command of basic French. So, they all decided to go to an ice cream shop and my friend did the ordering, to try out his skills. The lady behind the counter had just finished helping another customer in French. The lady at the ice cream shop claimed she didn’t understand him and said, “speak English”. My friend was shattered. But when he got back home, he mentioned it to his French teacher (who was from France) and she assured him that the French Canadian lady was being an asshole.

97

I have three such stories to tell. I don’t really speak any foreign language but my wife is quite fluent in French. She majored in it in college and then spent a year in Paris taking courses and living with a French family.

So we went to a meeting in Nice in 1970 and one of the things the meeting registartion (which cost 200 Fr for me and 100 Fr for my accompanying spouse) got us were free passes on the local tram system. So one afternoon we got on the tram, showed the passes to the ticket collector who let us pass, but muttered under his breath something like, “Fucking foreigners, they come and take away our space and can’t even pay tram fares.” My wife understood every word and in the presence of the entire car full of passengers, let him have it, explaining about the registration fee and all. When we got off a local woman came up to us and asked not to judge the French by that guy, saying, in effect, that he treat us all like that.

Later that same year we spent the year in a small city (Fribourg) in French Switzerland. The apartment we occupied was in a building with a laundry room. But each tenant got the key to the laundry room for only three days a month–consecutive. You were expected to do your laundry only once a month, for three days. The was a Scottish family living in the same building and my wife arranged with the Scottish woman to trade laundry days so we would have access twice a month. One day she was going up the elevator and she overheard a conversation between two women who were complaining about the lousy furriners trading laundry days. My wife didn’t say anything.

The third incident was in a restaurant in Zurich. It was during a meeting and around a dozen of us went to an Italian restaurant. Mostly we were Americans or Canadians but one the people was a Swiss who grew up in Ticino. The waiters started criticizing these foreigners in the most uncomplimentary terms. This Ticinese, who had a short fuse at the best of times, got up, grabbed one of the waiters by his collar with his left hand and made a fist with his right and let him have in, of course, perfect Italian. He didn’t actually throw the fist, but he certainly put the fear of god in him. It would be a long time before that waiter made nasty remarks about his customers.

98

ビッチ

I added an american touch to it (i was pretty loaded myself)

99

I apparently look German because I have been asked if I was German several times over the years.
On a Lufthansa flight coming home from India, I was quite exhausted, still covered in the dust of New Delhi, and having a hard time understanding what the nice woman standing before me was saying. It turned out that she had me pegged for German and had gone over the entire menu and appetizer choices in one big slug of German prose, while speaking English to all of my co-workers. And my honest sleepy look probably didn’t clue her in that I had no idea what she was saying.

I have been married to a Brazilian for 20 years, and have been speaking Portuguese for an equal amount of time. Nobody would guess that I would understand the language.
Though I dream about these kinds of “gotcha” moments, I can only recall one or two. Once we were sitting in Denny’s having dinner and a group of twenty-something girls was sitting at the next table having a conversation about subjects that are not often spoken of in public. They clearly trusted the gringo ears around them not to hear the spicy conversation.
I don’t remember what I said as we passed their table on the way out, but I know it was probably stupid (I’m not good at quick witty comments). Nevertheless, they know we had listened to their entire conversation.

I have found that most Brazilians are surprised when they meet me because my Portuguese accent is usually mistaken as a regional one rather than foreign one (oh, he’s from the south…), and they have never heard an American speak Portuguese without an American accent. This is nice because it offers an easy topic for getting a conversation going with total strangers.

And twice in one day in Rio strangers asked me “o senhor e alemão?” (Are you German?), further confirming my theory that I must look German.

100

There was a guy on one of mrAru’s boats that was of German descent, spoke fluent German and liked to drink occasionally.

The Spadefish pulled into Bremerhaven on a northern run, and mrAru and several of the guys went to some bar to drink. Said German speaking guy got a bit toasted and was climbing down the ladder into the boat babbling in German. The ladder in question was right outside the CO’s cabin.

CO comes storming out demanding to know who brought a German national aboard when the ship was afterhours …

The COB [top enlisted on the boat] had to explain that he was actually a crewman who really was a German speaker. Nobody smuggled on a German national :smiley:

Then a couple of the crypto techs found a Soviet military magazine with response mailers in for getting a military truck license, filled them out and mailed them in. They were disappointed they didn’t get their spiffy new licenses back in the mail :smack:

Same trip had a guy get lost and go into what he thought was a bingo hall or an equivalent. The poor desk guy was baffled when he asked was asked to call a cab to take him back to the American fleet docks … it was the Czech embassy. Poor sucker had about a weeks worth of paperwork to fill out because he actually spoke to a soviet block official [even though he was just some sort of clerk/secretary]