Fortunately I learned that one in class. In First year our German teacher brought in a friend and said we could ask any questions, but only in German. With my pathetic German I tried to ask if Germans drink their beer warm or cold and came up with . “Ist Deutshlandischen beir schwul oder Kohl getanzt.” ,
“Is Germanyish beer danced gay or cabbage?” The Look on the guy’s face defied description, and it took about five minutes for the teacher to understand my question well enough, to translate, then five more minutes to correct all my mistakes, with particular emphasis on schwul.
I took my mom shopping to pick up the ingredients for banana-nut bread. Needing something from another isle I left her in the produce section to pick out the bananas. I returned to her explaining to a bewildered elderly lady that she needed more “raped bananas” (the ones in the produce section were apparently too green). She was just starting to learn English at the time.
This didn’t happen to me, and it was more of a intra-language mistake, but still funny.
A sister of a friend of mine learned Quebecois French, and specifically the word “plen” (not sure of spelling) which means full, as in “done eating.”
However, in France, it means “pregnant animal,” so when she was over in Tours, at the end of a meal, they asked her if she’d like more, and she said “Non, je suis plen.” Through much laughter, they told her that she’d just said the equivalent of “No, I’m going to have puppies”
Yes, this is technically slang, but for an Australian girl at college in the USA it might as well be a foreign language.
I asked the person sitting next to me in math class if she had a rubber I could borrow. I did gather from her puzzled expression that it probably wasn’t the word I was looking for, tried asking for an eraser instead. She did provide the item in question, and corrected my mistake too. Rubber = condom.
At least I didn’t ask the cute guy sitting on my other side.
In Japanese, the suffix -sama is added to a word or name to indicate deity, divinity or supremacy. For example, [Japanese word for “sea”]-sama would mean “The sea god.”
“Kami” is the Japanese word for “god.” To say the name of the God of Christianity/Judaism in Japan, one says “Kamisama,” “the supreme God.”
So, an American missionary to Japan wanted to say “God loves everybody,” which is “Kamisama wa ninjin o ai shimasu.” What he actually said was “Kame sama wa ningen o ai shimasu,” which means “The turtle god loves carrots.”
My boss at the time was the missionary who had uttered this (long before I came to work for him). Guess you had to be there.
Well, I do speak and understand french fairly well, but every now and again, a crack in my vocabulary will show up and confuse everyone.
I used to work for Redpath Sugars, packing 2 pound pags of brown sugar. The crew I worked with were all bilingual as well, but were all francophones, so french was the language of the workplace.
We had a big vat of sugar to work with. My job was to empty 170 pound bags of sugar into it, and they would scoop it out into little bags and put those in boxes.
They would complain about the quality of the sugar, (Moist sugar is easier to work with that rock hard dry sugar chunks) and referred to bad batches, in my understanding, as "Full of Sheep"
I thought this was some sort of strange french slang, and let it slide.
For several weeks.
But everyone kept talking about the damn sheep in the sugar!
So a couple of months into the job, I kind of snapped and in english asked “What the heck are you talking about?!? Why would there be sheep in the sugar?”
…
I then learned that “muttons” (chunks, like in dry sugar) and “moutons” (sheep) were different words. They brayed at me whenever a bad batch came in from then on.
Not my experience, but there is the now famous utterance of John Kennedy in Berlin, wherein he supposedly said “Ich bin ein Berliner” (I’m a jelly donut), when he should have said “Ich bin Berliner” (I am a Berliner).
I studied Bahasa Indonesia in high school and university (also, Thai, at uni, but I don’t remember any major goofs I made in it. Mostly because our teacher didn’t laugh at tonal mistakes.)
In Bahasa kepala means head, and kelapa means coconut. If I recall, Kepala Sekolah means principal of the school. We had a lot of conversations inadvertantly about the Coconut of the School.
Worse than that, Udang means prawn, whereas Undang means something like principle. Undang-Undang Dasar means basic principles, and is what the Constitution is called. I wrote an entire paper discussing the various basic shrimp of the Indonesian Government in the twentieth century. Fortunately a friend caught it before I handed the paper in.
I also said that I like to eat s___ when I wanted to say I like to eat Thai food. Woops.
That’s funny, but you got it backwards, ningen is human and ninjin is carrot. Also, I’d rather translate “-sama” as “honorable” as it’s often used to refer to regular people. E.g. HeyHomie-sama, kyaku-sama (dear client), gaijin-sama (grrr).
But kame-sama makes me giggle all by itself, it sounds like it’s straight out of a children’s book. Also, you can only use “ai shimasu” when the object is a person. What your boss said thus comes out as:
In sign classes there is always someone who gets the sign for ‘work’ confused with a sexual slang sign. So, when they introduce themselves & talk about their jobs it’s always pretty funny.
Our basic Japanese language class in college was learning to ask for and give directions one day. I’m still not quite sure what the phrase I used was, (I haven’t taken any more Japanese, and it was a while ago) but when asked where the professor’s office was, instead of saying, “Third floor of the Strode building”, apparently I said, “Third floor on the sea of death.”
We had also been learning basic kanji, and among those we had learned were “jin” (person) and “dai” (important or big). Another student wanted to know if “daijin” meant an important person, (a politician, perhaps?) and the teacher loudly asked if he had heard the word in an adult movie. The poor guy was terribly embarrassed, as was the teacher, which probably made it all the more funny.
Daijin, with a different “jin” character means minister (political). Prime minister is sori daijin. Strangely enough, the big+person combination you mention means “adult”, but it’s pronounced otona.
Your “sea of death” would be shikai. It’s an obvious and probably very common mistake with begginers. The proper word for fourth (not third) floor is yon-kai. Shikai also means “field of view”, “chairmanship”, “dentist” and “city council”.
According to my former German teacher, that isn’t true. Kennedy would have said “Ich bin Berliner” if he literally meant “I am a person from Berlin.” However, by saying “Ich bin ein Berliner,” the meaning becomes metaphorical: “I am one with the people of Berlin.” Although “Berliner” is indeed the word for a type of pastry, it had no bearing on how his speech was interpreted. What Kennedy said was completely correct.
Our office passes around birthday cards for everyone, which means that everyone sees them (including management). When I received mine one year, I was startled to see that a Thai coworker had exhorted me to “Have fun and get stoned!!”. When I talked to her, I discovered she had thought that stoned=drunk. I straightened her out on that point, but I certainly endured some ribbing from my coworkers.
On Saturday night I accompanied my sorta-kinda-maybe boyfriend Stephen to Hattiesburg for his identical twin brother’s birthday party (Stephen had already celebrated his on Friday). We played poker, watched “The Crow”, played guitar, and I tried my first double-shot of vodka.
Anyway, Stephen was acting rather coy, so Charles staggers over and tries to have a brotherly talk with him. En français. Stephen tries to tell him that I can speak French, but Charles is so tipsy he won’t listen. He proceeds to tell his brother that if he (Stephen) messes up his chance with me (moi), then he (Charles) will personally punch him (Stephen) in the face for being such a dumb@ss.
I’m standing two feet away during this whole conversation, so of course I can hear every word. At the end, Charles pats Stephen on the back and turns to me. He’s looking a little parched, so I lean forward and say, “Charles, en français si vous préférez? Ça va? Mal?”
Charles blinks at me, turns bright purple, and yells “Sh!t!” while Stephen laughs at him. Happily though, Stephen didn’t remain coy for the rest of the night…
Shortly after moving to the States from Germany, my Dad went to Dairy Queen for some ice cream. Problem was, he ordered as would in Germany…he just asked for “eis”, and couldn’t figure out why they gave him a cup full of ice cubes.
