I heard this story from an american in Norway.
He was introduced to her family in Norway and wanted to show her father how that he could count in norwegian. The first numbers went well, “en, to, tre” but he couldn’t remeber the next, “fire”, so he guessed, “fitte”. Which is norwegian slang for female genitalia.
The car Honda Jazz was originaly named Honda Fitta but someone told them it was not a good idea.
I was working so hard at pronouncing “egg tart” correctly in Chinese that I didn’t realize that instead of saying “I want an Egg Tart,” I was saying, slowly and methodically “I am an egg tart.”
Chinese people don’t correct you when you do this sort of thing. They just sort of stare at you and smile.
Mistakes in American Sign Language:
A woman telling the (sign) class about herself meant to say “I am a full-time mom.” But she signed “I am a full-time man.”
Our teacher told us of trying to make up a sign for alarm clock. It was the real word for “asshole.”
During class time, she changed “miracle” into “necking”; it is a small change in the way you say “work”. So…wonderful work becomes “wonderful necking”. Pure bliss!
The German word Verkehr is normally used in reference to traffic,( as in jams, cars etc.) but it does have a more specific meaning as Geschlechts-verkehr i.e. Sexual Intercourse
A french girl-friend of mine moved to Germany and with her basic German went to see a gynocologist. When he asked her when she had last had verkehr she replied quite innocently “In the car on the way here” and couldn’t understand the strange look on the doctor’s face
Ok, I know this thread has been running quite a while ago, but I still have it in my bookmarks and I occasionally come back for a good laugh. And there are quite a few interesting words to learn here 
A friend of mine who is staying in Israel just sent me an e-mail and mentions that I can post his story here.
He went to the market in Tel Aviv and wanted to buy some coriander (koosbara in Hebrew). Since he is learning this language and still isn’t very comfortable with it, he made a little break between “koos” and “bara”. Well this pause totally changed the meaning of the word. The vendor was kind enough to tell him that he just wanted him tu give a kick in a pussy.
My friend stressed the fact that he was not meaning the pussy making meow meow, but the one everybody is talking of in this thread 
I don’t think that it’s necessarily that all mistakes are obscene; it’s just that those are the ones that we tend to remember.
My contibution: Luckily, I have not yet made this mistake myself, having been warned about it by my mother. Apparently, a common mistake made by foreigners in a Spanish country is to say “Tengo mierda” (I have shit) when they really mean “Tengo miedo” (I am afraid).
A little interesting fact I learned the other day: In Spanish, the work papa means both potato and Pope. Makes you wonder who saw the similarity…
~monica
My mother just mentioned another one when I told her about this thread. She said that a common mistake is to say “Tengo hombre” (I have man) instead of “Tengo hambre” (I am hungry).
I speak just a few words of French and can understand basic stuff. I mean I know perfectly the word for “day” is “Jour”. Some years ago I was crossing the border from France into Switzerland and the border guard asked me in French how many days I planned to stay in Switzerland. I was just driving through so it was one day. But for some reason my brain just locked up in the wrong place and One day came out as “Un Dieu”. The guard look puzzled and asked me again the same question and I answered with the same two words. He asked me if I was understanding the question and I said oui. He repeated the question a third time and I began to wonder if the idiot really spoke French. I answered with the same two words. He sighed and waved me on. Five minutes later I realized what had happened. I guess I was lucky it was Switzerland. If it was the USA after 9/11 I would now probably be locked up in Guantanamo now.
Well, now that this thread is back alive for a little while, perhaps a German can tell me if my old boss was full of BS.
One of his hundreds of questionable tales involved when he was in Germany in the army. He said that he overheard a gas station attendent commenting on how a woman “had a lot of wood in front of her door.” He told us that he thought it meant that she was well off, and indeed she was, nice car and all. Of course, when he tried his new phrase at his girlfriend’s parent’s house, it didn’t go over too well. He said that the phrase means “she has big tits”
This sounds like total hokum. Tell me now. Was Jerry pulling my chain or not? Can I go around telling German women that they have a lot of wood in front of their door? Does the phrase mean this in a vulgar way (i.e. “tits”) or in a silly way (“boobs”)?
Yes it does. Never say a woman has viel Holz vor der Tür unless you mean it. A variation I’ve heard was viel Holz vor dem Hut (a lot of wood in front of the hat). Your boss isn’t full of Quatsch.
My sister’s German teacher (his mother tongue is French so he had to go to Germany and improve his German before starting to teach classes) arrived there on a cold rainy day. First thing he did: he went into a coffee shop and wanted to order a hot coffee.
Now at this time, you have to know that in German, it’s very hard to pronounce an initial “h” like in the English word “hat”. Also, you won’t be too surprized to know that he didn’t master yet the gender of the articles and the endings of the adjectives:
Ok, so here’s what he ordered:
“Ein heiss Kaffee, bitte”
But it came out as: “Ein eis Kaffee, bitte”
Poor man, instead of heating his hands around a hot coffee mug, he received an ice-coffee cup!
Great thread, but I’m surprised this gaffe hasn’t been mentioned…
The wife of the American Ambassdor to Germany was attending a dinner party with her husband and wanting to impress her host said in German, “Ich bin kalt”.
She wanted to tell him the room was a little chilly, but what she really said was that she was frigid. The story goes that she told everyone who would listen to her that night that she was frigid.
What she should have said was “Es ist mir kalt”, meaning of course, that she was chilled.
Quasi
I had a habit of saying “Ciao” for goodbye. Not a problem until I was on the Queen Charlottes, building our cabin.
Apparently “chow” is the Haida equivalent of “cu**”. Not a good thing to say to say on a very small island with a very large Haida population.
Mine’s not really embarrassing… (except for the dumbness quotient it shows…)
I was talking with my french teacher about the Lord of the Rings movie. In French, LOTR = Le Seigneur des Anneaux.
I keep slipping up and saying “Le Seigneur des Agneaux” (Lord of the lambs.)
duh.
Viel Holz vor dem Hut? I think Hütte is the word you´re looking for, i.e. hut (as in mountain hut). Now, if your basic Bavarian says “Sie hat viel Holz vor der Hütte”, you might easily mishear it as “Hut” or just about anything, hence the misunderstanding.
minor7flat5, your boss was right. However, I wouldn´t go around saying it to women, as it´s rather vulgar. It´s the sort of comment you´d make to your (male) friends about a girl. If you´re in a German Wirtshaus (pub) with some German guys and say that about the waitress, you´ll be sure to get a laugh (and admiring looks for knowing the expression), but don´t let the waitress hear you.
While none of the words as such is offensive (no double meaning for wood, it´s just a figure of speach, I can´t tell you where it comes from, but as soon as you get used to the idea of thinking of a woman´s torso as the hut, you can imagine that big piles of wood there would mean large breasts…yeah, it´s a quaint language ), the phrase is used in a way women would consider offensive. (“wow, look at the tits on that one!”, or something like that)
Another German one, but this time a “passage of time” one.
My father’s German was good enough that he didn’t think about it, but he did learn it in the 50s. The look on the shop assistant’s face when (in the 80s) he asked for zahnpulver (toothpowder) instead of zahnpaste made me realise he was old.
I lived in Barcelona for a year and actually managed to avoid most of the typical mistakes… well, I visited my friends there a few weeks ago and we went to see the “cabalgata de Reyes”, the procession of the Three Magi, on Jan 5th (in Spain, the three kings bring the Christmas gifts on Jan 6th). They have this really beautiful big procession, all the kids (and some grown-ups…) are there to watch it. I thought it was pretty cool, I think it´s nicer than having Santa Claus sneak down the chimney, and we were all having fun - especially when I told one of the guys I was there with “nunca he visto una cabalgada de Reyes” (“I´ve never seen a…”). They all broke down laughing and after five minutes managed to explain to me that cabalgada has a slightly different meaning… “cabalgar” is to ride, so it didn´t take me long to figure out a “cabalgada” would be sex with the woman on top… they told me they´d never seen that done to the Three Magi either
This, fortunately, didn´t happen to me: we were going home from university and a Spanish student called out to a friend of mine he should hurry up so that we could catch the train. He shouted back, for the whole campus to hear: “Me corro, me corro!”
(“correr”- to run, “correrse” - to come (yes, that meaning))
Another friend of mine went to Mexico for a holiday. She already knew (from another embarrassing incident in Spain) that “paja”, while actually meaning straw, isn´t the word you´d use in a bar when asking for a drinking straw (“hacerse una paja”- to jerk off - the reason the Mitsubishi Pajero had to be renamed for the Spanish-speaking market… :p). In Spain, you can get around this by asking for a “pajita” (little straw), and you won´t get any stupid grins… Well, in Mexico they use the diminutive form for just about every word, so when she asked for a pajita in Mexico, the barkeeper tried to keep a straight face while her Mexican friend told her what she really wanted was a “popote”…
Regional differences in language use can kill you - a friend of mine from northern Germany was in Vienna and was talking about how his Dad used to change his diapers when he was a baby (that´s strange enough in itself, come to think of it… no idea how that came up, I think it was about nursery rhymes or something) and said “immer wenn mir mein Vater den Hintern gepudert hat…” (“always when my Dad was powdering my ass”-you know, with baby powder) and got some really strange looks.
“pudern” as an Austrian slang word means to f*ck… OMG, that was bad.
oh, when I say “got some really strange looks” I guess I really mean “everyone was laughing their heads off”… Everyone knew perfectly well what he meant, but Austrians´ll grab every opportunity to laugh at German as it is spoken in Germany - the poor guy had no idea what he´d just said, and though “pudern” is perfectly understood to mean “to powder” in Austria at well, your basic Austrian would avoid sentences as these because of the really gross double meaning…
My mistake. I fell asleep during Basic Bawdy Bavarian Banter 101 :).
At a restaurant in Perigord I noticed that baked apples were on the dessert menu. I told everyone else about it. One other and I decided to have them. So when the entree was finished and dessert was ordered I just casually pointed at the first “pommes …” I saw and my friend and I had baked potatoes for dessert.
It wasn’t really all that embarrassing but it was sure funny, especially the relieved look of the waitress’ when we all burst into laughter when our “dessert” was delivered.