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Humorous Blunders in Your Target Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Cultural Experiences in Foreign Languages |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5366 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 153 of 185 02 September 2010 at 4:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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When I was still learning English, I told a girl "You'll miss me"... I always wondered if she understood what I meant because I never heard from her again.
In Japanese, I still confuse unko (poop) and anko (bean paste), and hantai (opposite) and hentai (pervert). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5941 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 154 of 185 02 September 2010 at 5:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
I said the same thing once to an ex-girlfriend. Turns out I was right (she did not really have the scope sighted in correctly and missed me by at least a couple of feet).
Dining out for you in Japan may well be an adventure!! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5366 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 155 of 185 02 September 2010 at 5:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
Unfortunately, in this case, even seeing the object first turns out to be confusing :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| clang Groupie United States Joined 5324 days ago 54 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, Italian | Message 156 of 185 02 September 2010 at 5:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm still embarrassed of this one. I, a 25 year old, was outside playing with a bunch of the neighbor kids. I climbed
to the top of the jungle gym and, being incredibly clever, proceeded to exclaim "Смотрите на меня, я выиграл! Я - коровa!" thinking I was saying "Look at me, I've won! I'm the king!" The kids all stared at me and said "no no, that's the girl version, you should say 'бык'." Because I'm not the brightest, I tried to explain to the children my train of thought: Wasn't it that королева was the feminine and коров (a?) was the masculine, queen and king? They just rolled their eyes. It was only that evening that I realized what I'd been saying. Корова = cow, король = king, and королева = queen (and бык = bull or ox or something). 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| AeOeUe Tetraglot Newbie Germany Joined 5203 days ago 16 posts - 31 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Dutch Studies: Russian | Message 157 of 185 04 September 2010 at 11:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have had tons of blunders in Russian since I was forced to speak it although I have
no fluency in it at all... Once asked if I wanted to buy a "Platskart" (i.e. a seat rather than couchette on a train) I exclaimed "Nyet! Ya khochu SPID!" ("No! I want AIDS!") instead of "ya khochu spat" (I want to sleep), which at least made the woman at the ticket counter, otherwise a typically grim worker, burst out laughing. Another time I had learned that "ya shuchu" means "I'm joking" and that past tense is formed by adding a "-la" to the stem, so I told my friends "ya shuchula", meaning to say "I was joking", but apparently it came out as "I'm a little penis". (At least that's what they made of it, I haven't found this vocabulary in any dictionary yet. The correct form would have been "ya shutila".) 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| cymrotom Tetraglot Groupie United States cymrympls.blogspot.c Joined 5022 days ago 56 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English*, German, Mandarin, Welsh | Message 159 of 185 24 February 2011 at 10:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
Bean paste sometimes looks like poop :D
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jdmoncada Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5019 days ago 470 posts - 741 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Finnish Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 160 of 185 25 February 2011 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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In my Spanish class at the university we were working on past tenses of the language. So we were asked the question, ¿Porque no comiste el desayuno? (Why didn't you eat breakfast?)
I was very quick to answer, Porque yo no tenía hambre. (Because I was not hungry, or literally "Because I did not have hunger.") My teacher made a joke that made me doubt I'd said the correct answer, because she said, "'Porque yo no tenía hombre' es muy diferente." The funny here is that by changing only 1 vowel, the sentence became "Because I didn't have a man." And I guess that's one reason some people wouldn't eat breakfast. :D 1 person has voted this message useful |
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