“I knew a Japanese lady who had married a G.I. after the war, and . . . he didn’t know Japanese and she didn’t know English.”
—Were they even aware they were married, or was this an elaborate practical joke played by their friends?
I actually thought of another one. I was traveling in southern France with my then-boyfriend. We stopped at this hotel near the train station in Nimes, we were just that exhausted we couldn’t look for anything else. They showed us to our room and we were rather disturbed to discover a (used) condom lurking about the bathroom. My So wanted me to complain to the management, but my PG-rated Middle-school french classes had not prepared me for this eventuality. After pondering how to explain “used condom” without knowing the word for “condom” I came up with “mal chose du sexe” (Bad Sex Thing, sort of) which even to this day cracks me up every time I think of uttering those words. I can’t imagine how hilarious and incomprehensible it would sound to a native French speaker.
Since I couldn’t say it without laughing, in the end I ended up complaining about the cigarette smell instead, and letting the “mal chose du sexe” pass unremarked-upon.
For a few years me and the SO used this phrase as a subsititute for “condom” in conversation.
Great thread! Alice…you win. 
chula…very cool greek font. Wish I knew how to do that.
Anyway, mine happened when I was about 11 or 12 in Greek School. Our class was going over the days of the week. Each student said a different day. When it was my turn, I attempted Friday. Paraskevi came out paraskata which literally means “take shit”. Some of the other kids in the class had already “learned” the “important words” and burst into laughter. Only after class did the teacher finally inform me of what I had said.
Why is it, anyway, that nearly all the mistakes made when speaking a foreign language are obscene in some way? Statistically, should that happen? It has always puzzled me.
Anyway, in highschool I lived in Denmark for a time, and got pretty good at Danish. Then came the day when we were at a family party for a holiday, everyone in their best clothes, and I informed my host grandmother that I couldn’t sh**. I meant to say I didn’t know how to ski.
I took Russian in college, and was at a tutoring session with my TA one day when I tried to say something kind of complicated, I can’t remember what now. He got a really interesting look on his face and said, “I beg your pardon?” He never would tell me what I had said, but I guess it was pretty awful.
My husband was on his mission in South America when he did the embarrassed/pregnant thing. Now he was embarrassed.
I think I’ve blocked out all the embarrassing mistakes I’ve made, but I remember one girl in my Spanish course who simply could not get her head around the fact that estoy means “I am”, caliente means “hot”, but estoy caliente means “I am horny”.
Also, not quite the same thing but a Croatian girl who used to work in my office once handed me a corrected document (which would have been sent out to a client!) in which I’d asked her to change a particular word to “that”. She couldn’t understand why I nearly shit myself laughing when I saw that she had accidentally made typed the second letter as a “w” instead of an “h”.
Er, embarrassing native language mistakes anyone? (ignore the word “made” in that last sentence of mine … thanks)
Mercifully*, our very good-looking French professor kept us from making the same mistake in French.
The lesson on weather coincided with the end of a warm summer, and I think had he not cautioned us, many of us would have entered class on Mondays remarking how horny we were or how horny we’d been that weekend.
*- Inadvertent pun
They’re not. Most mistakes happen without incident, because they’re merely unintelligible, like “I go the hat house” or something. So they pass without comment, or are corrected and forgotten.
It’s only when you accidentally say “I want you to sexy fart on my gorrilla” that a riot ensues. 
Gorilla. One r.
Despite having studied a number of languages, I have better sense than to try to converse in any of them. I did have a fairly dim co-worker, one of our sales reps (of course), who decided that it’d be good to e-mail our foreign distributors in advance of a major trade show many of them would be attending to suggest that they arrange to meet with us. So far so good. However, he’d just heard about AltaVista’s Babelfish translation service, and thought it’d be cool to translate his message into their respective native tongues. He wasn’t particularly articulate in English however, and his message was riddled with American idiom that couldn’t possibly have been machine-translated accurately. The high point was the German translation of “I hope we can touch base with each other during the show”, which came out as an expression of a desire to feel each others undergarments.
Going the other direction, I was an assistant to the English department faculty as an undergraduate, and was occasionally asked to mark up composition papers for basic spelling and grammar. One student was a young Hindi-speaking Indian woman whose husband was a new assistant physics prof. She was writing a paper comparing and contrasting the feminist chestnut “Why I Want A Wife” with another essay that made the same points in a different way. Her paper contained the sentence: “This is not a good arrangement because only the male member is happy.” I elected to let the professor explain why that was perhaps not what she intended to say.
I have no stories, as I don’t know any living foreign languages, yet. (I know a bit of Latin, and I’m just starting Arabic.)
Nonetheless, I simply must say that this is one of the funniest threads I’ve read in a long while. Coo’ beans!
When I was in the Peace Corps, I was on a very small island in Micronesia. The language was very obscure (only about 2,000 people in the world speak it) so it was hard to become too good at it before one got there. It didn’t help that it was a tonal language; something we are not too used to here in the States.
I always had trouble with church and toilet. They were very similar pronunciations and I would forever think I was telling people to meet me at the church and I was actually telling them to me at my outhouse, but for the worst was “wong” with a softy pronounced short “o” and rising “n” and “wong” with a sort of softly pronounced short “o” with less of a rise on the “n”. The first one meant the meat of the sea turtle (perhaps the greatest tasting meat ever - it has the taste of wonderfully cured beef and the consistency of fish). The second meant penis.
The first time I asked for another bite of “penis” during a big celebration, it first brought complete silence then the entire village was rolling on the ground laughing. On later occasions, even if I got it right, people would start laughing just remembering me mispronouncing it the first time and I would change to the other pronounciation and they would laugh even harder and…but you get the idea.
I always saw part of my responsibility as a Peace Corps Volunteer as keeping the locals entertained.
TV
ME: 33 year old American teacher
MY CONVERSATION PARTNERS: 13 year old girls in my junior high school
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It turns out that “It’s very beautiful tonight” and “You are very beautiful tonight” are the same in Japanese, and that 13 year old girls will always choose to understand what you say in the most flattering way (and at least in my schools don’t tend to be as creeped out as they should be by what they think they heard). Great, I’m thinking, been here a week and I’ve already hit on my students.
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A previous teacher taught the kids British English. The kids were cleaning up outside on a cold snowy day, the girls wearing their skirts or gym shorts, except for one smart girl wearing full length sweats. I said, in English, “It’s very cold. Why aren’t you wearing pants?” Two girls, faces frozen in confusion and horror. Suddenly, I remembered that “pants” means “panties” in British. Quickly grabbed and flapped the fabric of my own trousers, saying, “pants, pants. Why don’t you wear pants?” Flash of understanding, relieved looking girls.
Student errors, mostly due to the L/R switch and the inability to say “si” without it sounding like “shi”: “After the performance, I crapped and crapped”; “Excuse me. May I shit next to you?”; and too many others. Also, one girl delights in getting her friends to unknowingly use sexual expressions, so that now whenever someone innocently says, “Yuko came to my house. I enjoyed sleeping with Yuko,” I automatically walk over to Mayu and hit her over the head with my textbook.
If English counts as a foreign language, then I can’t help thinking of my friend, who went to work in an English church as part of an exchange-preacher program of some sort.
He arrived late to a Bible study full of elderly women, explained that he was late because he couldn’t find his suspenders, then went on to describe Leviticus as ‘bloody difficult to read.’
Got quite a reputation.
Fortunately, MY biggest foreign language error wasn’t of a sexual nature. In Spanish, the word “there” (as in not here) is alla. The word “yesterday” is ayer. I repeatedly asked a busboys in the restaurant where I worked to please move the table yesterday.
At the time, I also had a small child, and so was used to making “mommy noises”. So when I pulled a bad ketchup off a table in the restaurant, and the busboy tried to retrieve it and put it back on the table, I said, “No, no. Ucky, ucky!” He looked at me quizzically and moved the ketchup around on the table: “Aqui? Aqui? (Here? Here?)”
A friend of mine was trying out her conversational French in France. When asked by her companions how she got her long straight hair into a wavy style, she MEANT to say she’d braided her hair and slept with it in a bun (chignon). What she did say was “I tied it and slept with a Chinaman on my head.”
Hmm… This used to happen so often, you’d think I’d be able to recall some better ones. OsakaDave already wrote about the common human/carrot swap, so I’ll fall back on something that I think of whenever I walk into a bar:
Around the time I finally felt my Japanese was getting good enough to actually communicate with the locals, I walked into a bar and meant to ask a woman if the seat next to her at the bar was taken (Suwatte mo ii desu ka? - May I sit here?), but instead asked if I could feel her (Sawatte mo ii desu ka?).
Eva Luna said:
Ooooh, I feel embarrassed for your 9th grade Spanish teacher. :o
Wow. The stories in this thread are just fascinating.
malaka, I cut and pasted the greek words from Word. If you use the “Symbol” font, it won’t work here, so I inserted the characters from the insert characters menu. I don’t know if there’s an easier way to do it.
Ok 2 quickies, one was a set up joke, the other a plain mistake.
First the set up joke. I had a friend who was going on a Norwegian Cruise and knowing I had a little background in it, asked for a few pleasantries. I told him that as he was boarding the vessel that the Capt. would greet him, he asked for a reply in Norwegian. I told him to reply ‘I have heard of you captain, you are the greatest Hest kuk in the north Atlantic’ he asked me what it meant and I told him it was an Old Norse word for intrepid sailor.
He went on board and greeted the captain, with his phrase and the captain blanched, asked him to repeat it, in Norwegian again. He did, and then asked to hear it in English. Then the captain burst out laughing. Invited my mate to the Capt. table for dinner, to explain the meaning. ‘Hest Kuk’ in Norwegian is Horse Dick.
Once while I was working in Japan, we had an international meeting, with English, Spanish, and Japanese speakers. Most business was done via a translator, who was very good until after lunch had a ‘gero’ attack (vomiting). and I got enlisted to help with the translations. After about 5 minutes into it I had the swing of it, until the whole room went quiet. I was so busy translating 3 languages, I forgot who I was talking to, ended up giving advice to the Spanish in Japanese, relaying a question, to the Americans in Spanish, and giving the Japanese an answer in English. Chuckles all around and the promised to slow down for me for the rest of the meeting, so I could do it without getting flustered.
When I was in 7th grade I was quite good at English, so during tests I would correct the writings of the people left and right of me after I had finished my test. However, I was caught because I started laughing out loud when reading these sentences:
(describing how to use a payphone)
“You hire (lift) the receiver, insure (insert) the coins and then look up the number in the dictionary (directory)”.
(When we were reading “The Pearl”)
"Kino and Juana waited until dark so that the truckers (trackers) couldn’t find their trucks (tracks).
When we were taking part in a student exchange, my friend told her host family in Philly that she really liked the “vans” that they had on the ceiling instead of air condition.
During the same exchange I confused my host family when telling them a recipe for potatoes au gratin, because I called nutmeg “musk” (in German nutmeg=Muskat).
An American colleague working with me in Frankfurt often complained on how “schwul” (queer) it was outside, when she actually wanted to say “schwül” (hot & humid).