Which leads to the somewhat risque joke… “What does Israeli Barbie cry in the throes of passion?”
"Ken, Ken, KEN!!!
And one I noticed at the food store today…
Raisin in French is ‘grape’ in English.
le shampooing = shampoo (yes, really)
Perhaps from “smoking jacket”?
Here’s an opposite example. My father’s English is as good as mine, but he still finds the phrase “for sale” funny. In French, “fort sale” (with an unpronounced ‘t’) means “very dirty”.
I haven’t heard that one, but to me jogging in French is “jogging” which I suppose fits as well. Also “zapping” which means channel surfing.
Don’t know about Spanish, but “store” does mean a window blind in French. And I have also heard “mobbing” for workplace bullying, but I don’t remember in which language it was.
And prune means “plum”.
And “Jeep/Eagle” (as in, radio or TV ads exhorting you to “visit your local Jeep/Eagle dealer NOW for incredible blah blah blah”) always struck my friend’s dad as funny because it kind of sounds like Mandarin Chinese for “chicken butt”. But only if you’re weird and perverted, because nobody else seemed to notice this until he pointed it out.
That reminds me, in Italian the word “forte” means strong, which makes sense to most of us, but the expression “che forte” means “how cool.” The word “sale” means “salt.”
Awesome. And it is a big square building (box) with the word “dix” on it. 
I stumbled across apescollar flipping through my Collins Spanish-English dictionary and thought it looked funny - it’s listed as Cono Sur (i.e., Argentinian). With Argentina you just never know… The other two I have heard in common use here in Spain. mobbing is an interesting story - a thoroughly pseudo-English word that was invented by the Swedish and has been incorporated into the lexis of many European languages, including Spanish. store I’ve also seen spelled as stor or estor - not sure where the word comes from but it is in use here in Spain.
In Indonesian, water = air.
Ah, now I know what you meant. It’s not “store”. It’s estor (pl. estores). Stor or store would be horrific misspellings.
Interestingly, Castilian (Euro) Spanish is the dialect I speak. But it’s been years since I’ve been to Spain, and I never heard mobbing.
Doesn’t insupportable basically mean “big pain in the ass” in French, i.e. insufferable? In English it sounds like some sort of legal term.
Cantonese: méi is pronounced may, but means have/did/may not.
Japanese: Hai is pronounced ‘hi’ but means ‘yes.’ I’ve overheard phone conversations where it sounds like the person’s constantly greeting the caller.
Czech: ‘Ano,’ pronounced with the stress on the ‘no,’ means ‘yes.’
Finnish: ‘Ei,’ pronounced like ‘aye,’ means no.
Also in German roughly translates as “thus.” The word is used a lot in conversation as a verbal pause where English speakers often say “umm.”
The Danes are also big on fart kontrol.
Then again, over in Holland, they have Elektro Faarts. :eek:
Fart kontrol = Danish, “speed limit”
Elektro Faarts = appliance business; owner’s name is Richard Faarts
I hesitate to reveal what Bimbo means in German, but sadly it’s
our n-word
It’s spelled that way in the dictionary. Not just in my Collins but in the Diccionario de la lengua española. Anyway, in the spirit of the thread I was trying to come up with words that scan orthographically as English. That’s why I chose the less common alternate spelling store rather than estor, which couldn’t pass as English.
A little off topic, but my ex-wife, who was fluent in nine or ten languages, managed to come up with a rare French-to-Modern Icelandic false friend. She excitedly told her friend from France about the beautiful “foss” she saw in Iceland. While “foss” is Icelandic for “waterfall”, her friend thought she had said “fossé”, which in French is the rather less elegant “ditch”.
Spanish for “to bother” is “molestar.” Which sounds a lot more than a bother, if you ask me.
Yes. When I visited Mexico with Mrs. Map, where I had lived but she had not, and she asked me what the “No Molestar” sign on the hotel room meant, I kiddingly told her it meant “Please Do Not Have Sex with Children”!
Okay…my contribution is purely aural/oral: many Spanish speakers pronounce caos (“chaos”) exactly like the English word “cows”. There has to be a Far Side cartoon in there somewhere!