The “para” in parasol means “to shield” or “to protect”, not “for”.
I’m not a linguist, but I do have some favourite words to share.
The Italian for ‘tortoise’ is ‘tartaruga’, which I think is fun to say and a really neat-sounding word.
In Slovenia there’s a meat dish called cevapcici (the word involves some accents that I can’t easily create on my standard keyboard). You say, ‘che-vap-chee-chee’, which is nice to say. I can’t honestly say I thought very highly of the dish itself.
Small hand-held fireworks consisting of stiff wire coated in fireworky stuff. We call them ‘sparklers’. In Sweden they call them ‘tomteblosse’, and the singular is the same as the plural.
I like the fact that the Italian for mud is ‘fango’. Great word, so much better than ‘mud’.
I just visited Montreal and liked the fact that when you walk into a book store, at first it looks as if they have a really vast section devoted to Italian people and history… well, just look at all the signs saying ‘Romans’.
Not really a linguistic point, but I also like the fact that in Baden Baden, in Germany, all the vehicle licence plates bear the designation ‘BAD’, so all the drivers are officially bad drivers.
In French class we were taught “doigt” worked for all 20, maybe it was just to make it easier since a French speaker would understand it anyway.
Finnish and Estonian are close enough to each other that, when shopping in Tallinn, I can respond to the Estonian-speaking store personnel’s questions in Finnish and carry on a mutually understood conversation. However, there are a few false cognates which can cause confusion; for one, the Finnish word “halpa” (“cheap”) is very close to the Estonian “halb”, which means “bad” or “poor” (as in poor quality). It’s a common story that Finnish tourists going to Estonia walk around commenting on how cheap everything is compared to Finland and the Estonians get offended because they think Finns are going around dissing everything. (I don’t know how true this is.)
Others include “kalju” (Finnish “bald”, Estonian “cliff or boulder”) and “ilmavaevad” which is an Estonian word meaning “weltschmerz” but which is very close to the Finnish word for flatulence. (Although, excessive farting could cause quite a lot of mental anguish, no?) My favorite Finnish-Estonian false cognate, though, is “hallitus”. In Finnish, the word means “government”. In Estonian, it means “mold”.
Thanks - now I see the difference.
Works both ways… 
I love this.
English and Spanish have a lot of cognates, especially in the dialects spoken along the U.S./Mexico border. For many adjectives, you can simply take the English word, and just change the ending to “-o” or “-ado”.
However, “embarrazado” does not mean “embarrassed”. It means “pregnant”. Sooner or later, everyone gets embarrassed by this.
Another one from Hebrew that just came back to me. Probably apocryphal, the story is a Frenchman who had spent some time here was asked what he thought about the language. Well, he said, most words are kind of heavy, and the gutterals get under my skin – but there’s one word I loved; it’s so light and airy! – “Oom-la-la!”
“Oomlala” means a thorougly sad, dejected and generally unhappy female…
A French word I recently learned is ronronner, which means to purr (as a cat) or to hum. The song “Da Doo Ron Ron” comes into my head when I see it.
I’m amused by the words in Portuguese and Spanish that are written and sound the same, but have different, or slightly different, meanings. An easy example: mariposa is butterfly in Spanish, but moth in Portuguese. Acordar is “to remember” in Spanish, but “to wake up” in Portuguese.
And Nava, having had lovers of different Spanish speaking countries, I get to listen to all the different slangs… which sometimes makes me go “huh”? At least I don’t laugh in front of them…
Not surprisingly (and I apologize for not having a link handy), the anatomical term “vagina” was taken from the Latin word for “sword sheath/scabbard”. Yup, your average centurion kept his gladius in his vagina. 
This came up several years ago at Seattle Mariners’ games. Edgar Martinez was knocking the cover off the ball on a regular basis, and pretty soon people were showing up at the ballpark with big signs that read, “EDGAR ESTA CALIENTE!”, which in the slang of 'Gar’s native Puerto Rico meant “Edgar is horny!”
learning to count in Japanese begins with an “itchy knee”
I am the eggman…
Heh. This was my first German linguistic mistake. I had just started an introductory German class and my German boyfriend told me (over the phone) that he was feeling pretty rotten. I thought I would pull out some of my new vocabulary words and asked him, ‘Bist du heiss?’ He paused for a moment and then suggested that I never ask that question of my German boss.
Damn you!! I came in here to give this very example!
And I am the walrus, baby!
When I was in China a couple years ago, I learned that Mandarin for France is fǎ guó (pronounced fa gwah), which sounds very similar to foie gras, a French delicacy (and a pathological condition, fatty liver).
Spoken Mandarin makes no difference between he, she and it. All three are pronounced exactly the same.
When I was teaching English at a university in Taiwan, my students would often go back and forth between "he’ and “she” when speaking about the same person.
My wife is from Taiwan and although her English was quite good when she first arrived here in California, she used to have this problem. I remember my mom asking me one time why my wife had trouble with something seemingly so basic as an individuals gender.
My mother tends to just refer to everyone as “she”, including her own husband.
I remember discovering that the French rendering of Vladimir Putin’s surname is “Poutine”. Changed my view of the man forever.
Better to write it as “Poutine” to get the correct pronunciation than say it like it actually looks like it should be pronounced, which is “putain”, “whore”…
I love the names some foreign countries have in their own native languages, as seen on their stamps and coins. Hungary is Magyarország and Albania is Shqipëria.
My mother likes to translate the English “milkman” literally as “el hombre de la leche,” “the man with the milk” or “the man of the milk.” Now take into account that in Spanish a man’s milk can be either his mood or his semen, add that something being “la leche” means “the best,” and you get roomfuls of sunday school teachers in their 60s giggling like tweens…