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Humorous Blunders in Your Target Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Cultural Experiences in Foreign Languages |  | |
| Gary Rector Diglot Newbie Korea, South languagewatch.korea. Joined 6085 days ago 15 posts - 17 votes Speaks: English*, Korean | Message 65 of 185 06 April 2008 at 10:49pm | IP Logged |
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Some years back, a college professor friend of mine went to Dallas, Texas, as an exchange professor for a couple of years. His wife went with him. (They are Korean.) Although, my professor friend's English was very good (good enough to lecture on linguistics in English), his wife's English was minimal. When they first got there, they needed to buy some furnishings and other supplies for their apartment in Dallas, so they went to a local department store to do some shopping. While the husband stepped away for a moment to look for something he wanted to buy, the wife decided her English was sufficient to do some of the shopping without his help. She went up to one of the sales clerks and said, "I need bad sh*t. Where do you keep bad sh*t?" The clerk gave her a funny look and said, "Ma'am, we don't sell bad sh*t here." The husband, standing a few feet away, overheard this exchange and came running to save the day: "She means 'bed sheets'. We need to buy some bedding!" The amused clerk showed them to the right section, and my friend's wife decided to take an intensive course in English before she attempted to go shopping on here own again.
When I first came to Korea (more than 40 years ago, and I'm still here), I had had considerable basic instruction in Korean, but you know how you can miss out on learning some fundamental word even when you think you're doing quite well. At the boarding house where I lived, the lady who worked in the kitchen would bring me my Korean-style breakfast on a little table every morning. As she placed in on the floor of my room, she would say, "게리, 밥 먹게. (Geri, bammeogge.)", meaning 'Gary, eat your rice." But when she delivered the breakfast table to the old man who lived in the room next to mine she would say, "진지 잡수시소 (Jinji japsusiso.)" I was curious as to what "jinji" was, so when she came to me one day and said, "I know tomorrow's your birthday, so I'll fix you something special for breakfast. What would you like?" I answered, "I've always wanted to try some of that jinji I hear you giving to other people." She laughed uproariously and said, "Of course!" The next morning she brought me the same sort of meal she had always brought, only this time she said, "게리 선생, 진지 잡수시소. (Geri seonsaeng, jinji japsusiso." I was confused at first. I don't know why I hadn't thought of this sooner. I looked up "jinji" in the dictionary, and it turned out to be the honorific word for 'rice.' I was very young compared to her, so she had been using lower forms of speech on me, but honorifics on the old man. I felt really stupid, but learned a good lesson about checking words out before jumping in and using them. Gary Rector Edited by Gary Rector on 06 April 2008 at 10:51pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| LanguageGeek Triglot Senior Member GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6104 days ago 151 posts - 159 votes  4 sounds Speaks: German*, English, Hungarian Studies: French, Russian | Message 67 of 185 10 April 2008 at 7:43am | IP Logged |
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Pauline that is brilliant! You really made me laugh out loud about your little anectode.
Here is my story: I have been to Budapest recently. I was out with a friend and we waited for the the bus to arrive. I thought about lighting a cigarette but wanted to check the schedule first, to see if I would be able to finnish it. I saw the bus would arrive soon and decided to have a smoke later. I said something like " Mindjárt jön a busz, nem érdemes felgyújtanom" I thought it meant " The bus arrives soon, it is not worth lighting up" But: "felgyújtani" - to set on fire... I should have used "rágyújtani" - to light up, light a cigarette. So what I told her was like " The bus arrives soon (but) it is not worth to set it on fire".... You can imagine she had a real good laugh. And I was once again owned by the puzzling multitude of hungarian verbal prefixes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| OrlMoth Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6361 days ago 77 posts - 83 votes 2 sounds | Message 69 of 185 10 April 2008 at 6:37pm | IP Logged |
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An English teacher of mine told me of one horrible blunder she made when she was 14, living in Spain as a foreign exchange student:
She was trying to get her clothes out of a drawer, and announced loudly "No puedo abrir los cojones" (I can't open the testicles) instead of "No puedo abrir los cajones" (I can't open the drawers) She said her whole foster family was called into the room to hear her before they told her what was so funny. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ssizz Diglot Groupie United States Joined 6085 days ago 66 posts - 72 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Mandarin, Korean | Message 71 of 185 29 April 2008 at 10:43pm | IP Logged |
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Once, I was eating my lunch at a Chinese restaurant; and this was when I first started to learn Mandarin so I
was dying for any little chance to strike up a conversation with anybody that could speak Chinese natively. I noticed on the paper chopstick wrapper there were about 5 characters and none of them said 筷子 (kuàizi), chopsticks. Thinking this was an excellent conversation topic, I made the sentence in my head, "服务员，对不起请问。我想问 你几个问题。这个汉字什么意思？“ Basically, "Excuse me miss, I'd like to ask you a question. What do these characters mean?" Innocent enough, right? So, I got her attention, and she came over to the table. Where she was standing was kind of awkward, because I had my food near the edge of the table and I didn't want to cause any accident causing her to lean over to take a look at the small print. I got up out of my chair, leaned into her close and started my sentence: I got as far as "我想问你……“ When she covered her mouth and started to back away. This freaked me out, so I quickly said "怎么了！？“ (What's the matter!?") She answered back "You said you want to kiss...?" Which totally confused me. After a few verbal exchanges, she realized my mistake and laughed. Apparently, instead of saying 问 wen (to ask) on the fourth tone, I managed to say 吻 wen (to kiss) on the third tone. This woke me up and caused me to start paying attention to my speech more. I realized you can't just "wing it" with a tonal language, you could get into a lot of trouble -_- Oh, and there's also the time I assumed that "Vendito" was slang in Spanish for like "dude" after hearing it on a hip-hop song by a rapper from Puerto Rico, but that's another story... Edited by Ssizz on 29 April 2008 at 10:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6581 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 72 of 185 30 April 2008 at 1:27am | IP Logged |
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We had a good one in our Chinese conversation lesson last week.
One of my classmates is a very very very religious girl and we were supposed to say what we were doing on a regular day using sentences we allready knew and one of those sentences was: ...然后，我作早操。 昨完早操我吃早饭。 ...after that, I do my morning workout and when I'm done with my morning work out I eat breafast. The emphasis is on 早操 zao3 cao1 (morning workout) which when turns into zao3cao4 means 'morning sex' and this religious girl has said just that. So she basically said with a poker face, that in the morning she had morning sex and after she was done with that she ate her breakfast. The class ended right there :-) Another good one is 晚上我喜欢看书。 (wan3shang wo3 xi3huan kan4shu1 )in the evening I like to read books. But my classmate changed kan4shu1 to kan3shu4 and so he said: In the evening I like to chop trees. It just shows what you can do with Chinese tones. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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