Most embarrassing foreign-language mistake?

In My Humble Opinion
61

No specific mishaps that I can think of as a result, but I was never able to pronounce the German word for “night” (I always say “naked”), or the Italian word for “pen” (I always say “penis”). People got used to me saying things like “It is a very clear naked” or “May I borrow your penis” after awhile, though.

I was with an American and French Canadian friend in Italy (the French Canadian spoke excellent english), and we were talking with some German girls (who also spoke very good english) at a bar. My American and French Canadian friends had gotten drunk on a tour boat the night before, and were discussing their antics, when one of the German girls (confused at the conversation, which was laden with inside-jokes) asked something along the lines of “Is boat drunkenness some kind of cultural joke between Americans and French Canadians?” My American friend immediately replied, “Oh sure, there are lots of inside cultural jokes between Americans and French Canadians. Like, ‘hamburger.’” Taking my cue, I immediately burst out in uncontrollable laughter, tears streaming down my face, screaming “Hamburger! Hamburger! Oh, that one gets me every time!” The German girls looked quite perplexed, which caused the French Canadian friend (who quickly realized what we Americans were up to) to also burst out laughing, which only added to the Germans’ confusion. I don’t know if this would be better classified as a foreign-language mistake on the part of the Germans, or a cruel joke on the part of the Americans/French Canadian.

62

:slight_smile: I can just picture the reverse. Imagine the scene: It’s the Wild West, and a foreigner whose English is not perfect, urgently says to the townfolk:

I’ll have to dig around in memory and see if I can come up with anything from my Japanese days (now there’s a language that has too many damn homonyms)…Ooh, here’s a small one to start:
My teacher was going to be away for a few days and asked me to water her plants for her. Except that I mistook “hana” (flowers) for “hana” (nose). As soon as she saw my bewildered look, I think she realized what I was thinking.

63

My friend (no really, it was a friend!) was visiting her boyfriend in Germany. His mother was making them oatmeal for breakfast. My friend wanted to tell her that she wanted her oatmeal “mushy”, but just used the English word because she didn’t know the right one in German. As it turns out, “mushy” is or at least sounds like the German word for “pussy”. So my friend ended up announcing to her boyfriend’s mother over the breakfast table that she liked pussy. She noticed their surprised looks and tried to explain, but only made things worse. “You know, wet…pussy…::slurping sounds::”

The other day I had my hair down, and one of my Japanese friends commented, “Your hair look like worm!” I just sort of blinked at her, trying to think what she could possibly mean (she didn’t seem to be trying to insult me), and she clarified, “You know, hot, on your ears!” Oh yes, my hair was keeping my ears warm! I helped her practice the relevant vowel sounds a few times, so I don’t think she’ll make the same mistake again.

64

According to a friend who knew American Sign Language, the same sign you make to mean “football” (involves lacing together fingers from both hands) in the Eastern half of the U.S. means “sex” on the West coast! So depending on where you are when you sign “Do you like [gesture],” the response you get could be anything from “Go Packers” to a slap in the face to a date for the evening.

Patty

65

It’s quite easy. Just say ‘na’, then add a sound like you’re choking to death on a stick, then add a ‘t’. ‘Naghjhjghkhkht’. If it sounds like you’re dying, you’re saying it right. I have the very same problem, in that I find German’s ‘ch’ sound pretty tough to get right in consonant clusters – if I’m speaking slowly, I do it perfectly, but when I speed up to conversational pace, it becomes a ‘k’. Thus, when I say Macht (power, might), it sounds like Magd (maiden).

Der Politiker war illegal an die Magd gekommen. :smiley:

66

When I was in college I helped tutor the Japanese students in their English studies.

One of the guys was extremely fond of Elvis and even impersonated him in Japan. The thing you have to realize is that in Japanese there is no destinction between R’s and L’s; also between B’s and V’s.

Yuji was always singing, “Rub me tender, Rub me sweet.” It was just too funny for me to correct him.

67

The setting: An international graduate school in the Netherlands with 350 students from 85 different countries.

The Victim: A very distinguished professor, descended from royalty, always dressed to the nines. English was his twelfth or thirteenth language.

Towards the mid-afternoon break in his lecture on farming, the professor stated: “I have a farm, and on my farm I breed with my horses.” The three native english speakers in the class collapsed with stifled laughter. We pulled the professor aside at the coffee break to correct his english. When he asked what the true meaning of his words were, we glanced nervously at each other, and finally I said, “What you said implies that you have the same relationship with your horses that you do with your wife”. His shouted “OH NO!” stopped all conversation in the cafeteria.

68

This didn’t happen to me–it’s become a legend among LDS missionaries in Korea. Apparently this poor young missionary was exorting the members of his congregation to come to church every week, without fail. He meant to say bbajim obshi, for “without fail,” but instead he said baji obshi which means “without pants.”

My own language mistakes were mostly just annoying. Can’t think of any funny ones.

69

I just had one today in a business meeting.

I was explaining the meanings behind some English slogans we’d made, and one of them was ‘Everyday Special’. I was trying to explain that the significance of the word choice was that “imi ga hantai desu.” - the meanings are opposite.

Instead, I told them “imi ga hentai desu.” - the meanings are perverted.

As soon as everyone started laughing, I realized my mistake and corrected it. Fortunately, these guys were the type who’d prefer perveted slogans over regular ones.

70

In Korean, chamchi is tuna, and chamchi top-bap is raw tuna on rice, a popular dish. Chaji, however, is penis. A friend of mine once ordered a bowl of raw penis on rice, which brought nothing but a disgusted sneer from the waitress. Even when she realized his mistake, she didn’t laugh, but she did bring him the tuna. She was a particularly humorless waitress.

In Japanese (I haven’t spoken Japanese in 10 years, so forgive me if I get this wrong) mata-ashita is a way to say “see you tomorrow.” (Literally, mata means “again,” I think. The whole thing would be “again tomorrow.” I think.) Some words (nouns only, I think) can be made more polite by adding the prefix o, as in omizu, a polite way to say “water” (mizu). Adding the o doesn’t work with words like “again,” however. Omata, according to my shocked cow-orkers [sic, of course] means “crotch.” Leaving at the end of the day, I apparently told them “Crotch tomorrow!”

One more: In English, “sit” means. . . oh, you know. In college, I was doing a little solo guitar/vocal gig in a local coffee house, and I was attempting Cat Stevens’ Sad Lisa. It was a small crowd, in a quiet, somewhat dark room, with everyone leaning forward listening intently to the lyrics of this sensitive song, as I clearly sang, “She shits in a corner by the door. . . .” The mood of the room suddenly changed. I didn’t finish the song.

71

** The Beautiful Game ** is a musical about Irish football (American soccer), which includes some rough language. When the cast recording was released in the US, they changed some of the rougher naughty words and sexual slang.

For some reason, the idiot who did this chaged twt to cnt.

I had a heck of a time trying to explain this to a German e-friend. The only “C word” she knew was crap, and she didn’t understand why it was so bad. She’d never heard of the “T word.”

I guess you always lose something in the translation.

72

I know the feeling. I’ve lived here in Germany for going on fourteen years. When my wife and I got married, my parents and older sister came for the wedding. No one in my family (except me) really speaks a foreign lanuage, and my in-laws only speak German. My wife and I therefore got to do lots of translating back and forth. One evening, she had to take me off translation duty, though. I got out of sync, and was paraphrasing everything in English to the German speakers and doing the same in the other direction. Everyone got a paraphrased repeat of what they’d just said, but it didn’t get translated.

73

But this is actually true… either that or I’ve really been missing out!

74

Victim of a practical joke. While in Moscow for the first time in a public restaurant, my expatriate counterparts asked if I knew how to curse in Russian. So I said sure, and began espousing “Yobe vas” among others…sitting in a public place, not realizing that I was just slinging curse words out for no reason in a matter of fact manner in a place where ALL understood what I was saying… I was the center of attention with the natives.

75

“Penis and noodles” has got to be the FUNNIEST thing I’ve ever seen on this board!

I only have a mild one to contribute; my senior year of high school I took a year of Russian and one day after somebody else wrote a word on the board our nice teacher looked at it and got this really embarassed look. Turned out that by changing one letter in a perfectly innocent word, he’d written “b*tch.” We were highly amused.

But “penis and noodles” is FAR funnier!

76

One that happened to my sister: In high school, she was taking Spanish. Well, the Mexican gentleman across the street was fully fluent in English, but he insisted that she only talk to him in Spanish, so as to get some practice with the language.

So one day, my sister is doing some baking or some such, and discovers that we were out of eggs. So she does the logical thing, and goes over to the neighbors’ to borrow a couple. Except she couldn’t remember the word for “eggs”. So instead of asking for “dos huevos” (I hope I got that right), she asked for “dos pojitos”, two “little chickens”. She eventually got him to understand what she was asking for, but by that time, he was laughing so hard it’s a marvel he was able to get them out of the fridge without breaking them.

And not a mistake, but funny nonetheless: When I was taking Latin in ninth grade, we had gotten to the numbers. Now, in Latin, adjectives have three different genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter, depending on what they’re referring to) and six (or more) cases, depending on how they’re used in the sentence. In general, each of these eighteen forms can be different, as indeed is the case for the first few numbers. Higher numbers, though, use the same form for all genders and cases.

So, in learning the numbers, he had the whole class reciting the eighteen different forms. Then we got to six… Which is, of course…

Sex sex sex
sex sex sex
sex sex sex
sex sex sex
sex sex sex
sex sex sex

We did something similar when we were learning “facere”, a very versatile verb meaning roughly “to make”, or “to do”. The imperative form is “fac”. Now, you must realize that in classical Latin, the a is always prounounced as it is in “about”, and the c is always hard.

77

In France, stranded by a train strike in some tiny out of the way town, a fellow approached me and asked me something in French. I was trying desperately to understand him, while trying to explain in my very poor French that I had only very very limited understanding of French.

Eventually we both figured out that we were both tourists, and both native English speakers…

78

The Scandanavian father of a friend once said to me, “Much fuck this morning.” He was referring to the fog. I treasure the memory!

79

Oh boy…I live in a predominantly Latino neighborhood and made this mistake about a zillion times before someone corrected me. It was then that I realized why the guys in the neighborhood unfailingly greeted me with “Caliente?” in the summer…they knew I would respond emphatically “Si, si, estoy caliente!”

80

There’s an incredible diversity in the way the same language is spoken in different countries. My native language is spanish, and I can say that is the fisrst time I see a lot of the spanish phrases mentioned here.

By the way, i was in a bilingual school (spanish - english), so a friend of mine was doing a presentation with some of his friends to the rest of the classmates and no one was paying attention, so he suddenly says focus!! but you can imagine how it sounded.