Most embarrassing foreign-language mistake?

In My Humble Opinion
101

In Paris once, with my wife in a fairly basic small hotel, I couldn’t get to sleep because of the useless bolster they’d provided, instead of a decent pillow. So I went to Reception and asked for another pillow, in what I thought was my fluent French.

This seemingly straightforward request was met with a little laughter, which the lady at the desk explained. Apparently, “asking for another pillow” can be a euphemism for asking the hotel to provide, not only an extra pillow for your bed, but also a lady “of negotiable affection” to come and use it as well…

102

Howdy,

Although I am not a native speaker of either Tetun or Bahasa Indonesia, I currently am fluent in Tetun and knowledgeable in Bahasa. However, the road to glory is sometimes filled with horribly embarrasing stupidity. Listed here are just a few of my better moments…

  1. While shopping with my Timorese wife, I asked her in Tetun if her mother required any more tea. However, I accidentally switched languages when referring to the tea and ended up asking her if her mother needed to poo!

  2. One day while visiting a local “restaurant” I asked the very beautiful and very sexy young lady if she had any milk and that I wanted some milk. Now, this is where is really gets ugly. The Bahasa word for milk is susu. The Tetun word for milk is susun-been, which is quite literally, “breast juice”. The Tetun word for breast being susun. This in mind, I asked her, “Iha susun? Hau hakarak Susun!” Or in English, “Do you have breasts? I want Breasts!” Her very stunned facial expression said it all.

  3. Finally, another simple little slip of the tongue with my wife…
    I had just woke up and I thought that she asked if I had slept well, and I answered, “just a little bit.” However, what she actually said was, I LOVE YOU!" Needless to say, she was not amused. Also, the word for tomato is tomati. One of the words for always or forever is To’o mate (until death!) So when she asked me if I loved her forever, I thought she was aksing if I liked tomatoes, and my response, “I like salad!”

I hope that those make you laugh at least a little bit.

103

I never laughed that hard, I am at wrk and tears are going down my face…
This thread made my day! Thanks all!
I have cute ones, nothing too embarrassing (must have blocked those out).
I didn’t speak too good english when I first came to the States, and one evening kept saying how I stepped in a giant poodle, instead of puddle…
It also took me the longest time to hear the difference between, sheep, chip and ship. One day in the South of France with my husband, we were driving by a big naval yard (or something like that!), and I yell to my husband “look, that’s where they make sheeps!”
(I still say sheeps and shrimps too, I try not to… but usually fail)

104

There was this guy who went to college with my dad, a shy, soft-spoken Norwegian called Tomas. This was in Denver, Colorado, and Tomas wasn’t exactly the best english speaker around. I remember two stories he told us of his wacky misadventures.

OK, so Tomas is sitting at a park bench. He’s a nice, mannered young fellow, and for one reason or other he gets to chatting with the old lady sitting next to him. After exchanging a few pleasantries, Tomas pops the question, the question any of us would doubtless pop when chit-chatting with an old person: he asks her if she’s retarded. She stands up and walks away. Tomas does not understand why, but has a vague feeling he might have said something wrong. A flip through the dictionary upon arriving home reveals his horrendous faux pas, causing a violent nervous breakdown and respiratory failure (OK, not really, but this story isn’t half as good as the other one so I have to make up some drama to kinda even things out).

The other story, while not exactly a foreign-language mistake, is hopefully close enough to fit snugly in this thread. When told to me for the first time, this story led me to believe something I still hold to be true today: Tomas has been cursed by a) a dose of bad karma that would make an earthworm point and laugh, b) a particularly evil witch who’s particularly fond of sitcoms, or c) amazing comic genius that only manifests itself unconsciously, at very inappropriate times. During his first year of college in the States, Tomas had stayed at some sort of dorm that doubled as a community center for Nordic students on campus. To get into the building after a certain hour, you had to show your special pass to the guard at the door. The pass was called “Legislativ” something or other, usually referred to as “the LEG pass”, or just “the leg.” So, arriving home after curfew one night Tomas reached in his pocket for his pass, and found it wasn’t where it supposed to be. “Oh dear,” said Tomas to the guard, “I’ve lost my leg.”

Which hadn’t been half as funny had the guard in question not, in fact, had a wooden leg.

Yes. That man is alive and breathing out there somewhere still. I shudder to think of what golden moments I’m missing.

105

My wife is Thai and, unfortunately, Thai is a tonal language. This has led to numerous language disasters over the years. My last one was when I was introduced to my wife’s high school teacher.
Teachers in Thailand have a high social status as do older people. This was a solemn occasion and we were well dressed and had met in the coffee-shop of a large hotel.
My wife and I were chatting with this stern and starchy looking elderly lady and I was regaling her with a tale about a fat doctor I knew. The phrase “Maw Yai”, when spoken with a rising intonation means “fat (or large) doctor.” When spoken with a falling intonation it instantly translates as “Huge C*nt!” The wife kept kicking me under the table, the old lady was getting huffy at me but, did I take a hint? Certainly not, repeating the phrase loudly, several times, experimenting with the intonation each time. So much for making a good impression. S

A friend was in T’land and was practicing his Thai on a vegetable seller in a local market. As many of you know, Thai bananas are very short stubby things but DO taste good. My friend was telling the elderly vegetable man about how Western bananas are huge, with hand signs to show just HOW huge and Thai bananas were much smaller. After this, my oh-so-unlucky friend went on to say how much better he liked the taste of Thai bananas. The vegetable seller blanched at this and tried to get my friend to go away. Sad to say, the words for banana and penis are extremely close and he picked the wrong one.

It works both ways though. My wife and I were in a grocery store in the US and they had a large pumpkin on display. The Thai for pumpkin is Fuk Tong. Mucho consternation among the shoppers in the veg section.

Testy:)

106

Not with language, but with assumptions. Several years ago I was touring Greece. Eating in a small restaurant with my friend when a large lady entered wearing a bright red dress. The poor lady had been sunburned a uniform red herself. Now, if I had just thought a moment I would have realized that the lady was a tourist as well. Unfortunately, I didn’t take that moment, telling my friend. “Wow! That lady sure matches her dress!”
The nice lady turned around and admitted that she did, indeed, match the dress but was unaware of anything that made it my business. Judging by the accent, I’d say she was from Brooklyn. I left the restaurant shortly, very shortly, thereafter.

Testy.

107

In French:

One says Salut! (health!) when making a toast to another’s good health.

Saloud means bastard.

Never mix these up … as I once did.

(not sure I spelled saloud right … )

108

We say “sante”! Spiff!
Salop is bastard (some people spell it salaud).

109

Oh boy… this is a good one…

One summer I joined my grandfather on a trip to Guatemala. My grandfather is (I think) a somewhat renound dentist in Rhode Island, so every couple times a year, he travels to Guatemala with a missionary group from Minnesota. While in Guatemala, he travels around to different villages and plantations to pull or rather “extract” (as my grandfather corrects me) the local’s rotten teefs. Well, while I was on this one trip with him, I was unanimously designated the head “head holder.” I was basically the headrest for the dentist chair.

Yeah… so anyways, my grandfather isn’t very good at speaking Spanish (although he is getting better). He would go through the normal routine after giving his patients novacaine and ask them “¿Es su labio dormir?” which is supposed to mean “Is your lip asleep?” although it’s very incorrect. Well a few times, my grandfather said the word “labia” instead of “labio”, and this, as has been previously mentioned, means “vaginal lips” or “vagina”. Oh man… you should have seen the looks on these poor women’s faces. One lady even whined/winced and grabbed her crotch.

Hah… good ole’ gramps.

110

I can remember a few German mistakes that came up when I was in high school - I think most of the more memorable ones weren’t mine, but they were funny. One was a case of confusing “schiessen” (to shoot) and “scheissen” (to shit) while reading the script for a Western. So one student pronounced a particular line to mean “The cowboy pulls out his pistol and shits.”

The “I am warm” line is a problem in German as well as Spanish. Only in German, it means, “I am gay.”

111

I used to work in a Japanese restaurant. I stuck to English, except for the few phrases we had to use in business. Now, the owners of this restaurant were actually Chinese, which is where this one comes in. A man sat down at the sushi bar and ordered an appetizer, edamame (eh-dah-mah-may). Howerver, he pronounced it “ee-dah-mee-mee,” sending the Chinese hostess into fits!! “ee” means one, “dah” means big, and “mee-mee” is slang for breasts in Chinese. He only wanted one–not the pair!!

112

[bump]

Well, this one isn’t as embarrassing as some that have been listed, but things have seemed a bit tense around here lately on the SDMB, so I thought I’d revive this thread to try and lighten the mood, and maybe get some new participants.

My first job out of college was at a Jewish nonprofit that did vocational counseling and job placement for newly arrived Soviet refugees (plus since we had some refugee resettlement funding from the State of Illinois, some other East Bloc folks and Jewish refugees from other places, like the occasional Iranian Jew; basically, if they spoke English, Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Romanian, German, or Hebrew, we’d take a crack at helping them). The staff was about half American and half not; the job didn’t pay very well at all, so many of the non-Americans who worked there did so because their English wasn’t good enough yet for them to get jobs in their professions, or because their professions were such (orchestra manager, for example) that they weren’t likely to find a comparable one in the U.S. and made a career switch themselves. That, plus those of us who were American but spoke Russian were mostly liberal arts people by inclination, who were forced to deal with the highly technical Russian vocabulary needed to work with our mostly engineering- and science- and accounting-inclined former Soviets. So the opportunities for linguistic hilarity were pretty much boundless.

Eventually we realized that we were spending way too much money on professional translations of clients’ educational credentials to get them re-licensed in the U.S. (in professions like cosmetology, where re-licensing is basically a matter of documenting your education and experience rather than, say, medicine, which is a much more arduous process). So we hired an in-house translator, whom we paid even less than the job counselors. She had many years of experience in technical translation, but only a few months living in an English-speaking environment, so her daily vernacular vocabulary was sometimes a bit bizarre.

One day I was wearing a very simple garnet necklace, which I’d picked up at a flea market for a few bucks. Our translator took a liking to it, and decided to pay me a compliment. “Those are beautiful grenades you’re wearing, Eva.” (I should note that the Russian words for garnet, pomegranate, and grenade are all identical in the plural – granaty, so really it was hardly her fault.)

113

I’d been living in Taiwan for about 2 years, and spoke just enough Chinese to get myself into trouble. Used to go to a little restaurant around the corner from work a couple of times a week for lo mein and a bowl of wonton soup. Now, wonton is ‘hwun dun’, but I’d perpetually screw it up and ask for ‘hwun dan’ soup. The cook didn’t even crack a smile. Months later I took the future Mrs. Irae there for lunch, and she still asks me how I developed a taste for rectum soup.

114

Love this thread!

When I was in Egypt, I had a “houseboy” who cleaned, etc. We had access to the military PX and could order items through their catalog. I came home one day to find the guy looking through the catalog. He was able to scrounge up enough English to ask me “You buy for me Panasonic?”. After some sign language about price, he pointed to one in the catalog. “Panasonic!” he announced triumphantly. “No, Aiwa”, I replied. A confused look came over his face and he pointed again to the photo and said, more slowly, “Pan-a-sonic”. I replied, equally slowly, “No…Ai-wa”. He looked at me like I was a lunatic and tried once more, “Pan…a…son…ic”. I thought, well hell, might as well use my almost non-existant Arabic to reply and said, “La-a, Aiwa”, and immediately realized that what I had been saying to him was, “no, yes”, “no, yes”, “no, ye-e-es-s”, ai-wa being the word for yes, obviously.

I was on an assignment to Guatemala with a team. One of the guys professed to speak Spanish and I about fell off my chair when he tried to order breakfast one morning by ordering “Dos hueves frias” (two cold Thursdays) instead of “Dos huevos fritas” (two fried eggs). The waitress was completely baffled.

Another guy on the same team. This guy had a Louisiana accent and his Spanish was nearly nonexistant. I walked into the motel restaurant and he is sitting there with a plate of food and two plates full of french fries. I asked him why all the fries and he said something to the effect that the waitress was an idiot. I asked what he meant and he says “here, I’ll show you”. Calls her over and points to the potatoes and says “Mashed pappas!”. The gal looks at him incredulously and says “Mas (more) pappas?” “Si!” says my colleague. “Now watch”, he says, “she’s going to bring me more fuckin’ french fries.”

115

After unlearning Mandarin in Hong Kong for a few months I flew to Beijing, where I found myself speaking a bizarre hybrid dialect that nobody could understand for about a week. A lot of the time I had to try to guestimate the Mandarin pronunciation or expression from the Cantonese This resulted in my ordering, instead of stewed ribs (pai gu) stewed ass (pi gu). And I was ordering for the group since everyone else just got to China and I had been around a bit and thought I knew something about menus. Hilarity at my expense all around. The waitress corrected me fairly gracefully, fortunately.

Not a mistake, but the Cantonese phrase for one of my favorite hobbies, airsoft wargaming, also happens to mean to screw outside. No wonder most people just say “wargame.”

I saw a story by a Hong Kong girl who went to Beijing and had the same problem I did… In the airport, when filling out a form, instead of saying “Can I borrow your pen to fill this out?” she said “can I borrow your pussy to fuck?” D’oh.

116

When my wife and I were in French language training, we purchased a second-hand Jeep to take to Africa with us. The carpets in the thing were not glued down and I spent part of a weekend taking care of the problem. Now, part of the language program was to tell the class on Monday what one had done on the weekend. My wife proceeded to tell the class that “mon marie a fixer la tapete dans la quatre-quatre”. Well, the word for carpet is actually “tapis”. In French, “tapete” is slang for ‘homosexual’. And “fixer la tapete” means ‘had sex with a homosexual’. If the Jeep is a rockin’, don’t come a knockin’.

117

A frustrating experience for someone new to America. One of my Francophone teachers told us that when he came to the U.S. from Senegal, he tried hard to learn English, and wanted to fit in. He said his first try was when he purchased something at a drug store and when the clerk handed him his change, he said, in his best English, “Thank you”. The clerk replied “You’re welcome”. “Well”, thought he, “my accent must be apparent, since this man is welcoming me to the United States”. He says he went home and practiced saying ‘thank you’ for hours, even using a tape recorder and playing it back, until he thought he could say it without any trace of accent. Back to the store, and the same scene played out. Mercifully, someone finally told him what the customary response in English is to “thank you”.

118

A friend from France asked a schoolmate about his thesis. As many French-speakers do, she had trouble with the difference between “f-” and “th-”, and short and long vowels, and it came out:

“How is your feces coming?”

119

The German word “bitte” means both “please” and “you’re welcome.”

A German friend of mine, who otherwise spoke perfect English, always answered any expression of thanks with “please.”
“Thanks for dinner.”
“Please.”

At first, it was funny and I tried to correct him, and then it was so funny I started to pick it up myself.

120

While I was in France for a few weeks, I used the term “un petit peu” (a little bit), well, quite a bit. I figured everything in moderation, especially since whatever it was I was asking for, I wasn’t sure I would get. Anyway, after a couple of weeks, someone asked me if I was tired or something and I said I was, a little bit, or something to that affect. The person then told me, in something of a whisper, that maybe I should avoid that particular expression (un petit peu) since it could also mean “a little penis.”

I guess if you say you want a little bit of something and they hear “I want a little penis” they stop listening after that.