Ask Lemmy

I am an English monoglot. Years ago, was working overseas in Kuwait when I experienced a sudden onset of testicular pain and swelling. Went to the hospital and got taken to an elderly Arabic ultrasound technician to examine my junk. After a few minutes of smearing cold jelly on me, he says something...in Arabic.

I do not understand.

He repeats it, this time poking me in the fupa.

I look confused and try to adjust my position on the table to give him better access, hoping this is what he wants.

He sighs, searching for the little English he knows. Finally he says, "Like pooping...but not pooping!" and wags his finger in my face. That's how I understood he wanted me to tense my lower abdominal wall so he could check for a hernia.

I was resolving a conflict once and, instead of saying "make up or breakup", I said "make out or breakout". The fact I screwed that up probably helped the conflict cease though.

I've lived in a couple of European countries and speak 7 different European languages (though my German is kinda crap and my Italian not much better) and regularly take the piss by playing the "ignorant foreigner" with the expressions in other people's languages and acting as if, by translating them literally, I totally misunderstood them.

This works great because there are so many expressions in pretty much all languages which are have entirelly different meanings when interpreted literally but the natives don't really think about it like that because they just learned that stuff as a whole block of meaning rather than having reached it by climb the language-learning ladder from "understanding the words first" as foreigners do.

For example the English expression "I want to pick your brains" which has quite a different and more gruesome meaning if read literally or one the dutch expressions for "you're wasting time in small details" which translates quite literally to "you're fucking ants" and is my all time favorite in all languages I speak well enough to know lots of expressions in.

Talking to someone from Korea in VRChat and they only knew some English.

Someone said Cancer and they got all excited saying they knew that word, it means leage of legends.

I once tried to say “I don’t fuck about” in Italian to my Italian friend. I ran it through DDG and replied to him with something along the lines of “Non cazzetto”.

He was a little surprised that I’d admitted to him that I don’t fuck, but treated me with sympathy all the same.

Polish word for "searching" - "szukanie" - means "fucking" (the performance thereof) in Slovak language. This becomes a topic - and a source of amusement and confusion - almost every time people from these countries meet together, because how often these words are used.

I don't have an anecdote, but I do have a good joke.

Late at night, a German coast guard radio operator gets a distress call. A British ship has capsized and is quickly taking on water.

"We're sinking, we're sinking!!" The panicked sailor yells over the radio.

Confused, the German operator takes a minute then responds "What are you... sinking about?"

George Carlin talked about this, "Take a shit? You don't take a shit, you leave a shit! That's the whole idea!"

I have only ever heard the story, but my grandma came over here from Germany after WW2 to marry my grandpa (American Army) after they met in Germany.

Anyway, they are driving and she is learning English and she gets horrified and says, “THEY SELL THAT HERE?!”

My grandpa turns the car around and drive back to read the sign which had “pups for sale”. Because she was German and the U is usually pronounced with an OOH sound, well…she quickly learned how to say “pups” in English.

I, an English speaker, was interacting with a Spanish patient at work. It was me first week, and it had been a long while since I had spoken Spanish but I had been nearly fluent for years. The patient had neck pain. I walked in and very confidently asked "Donde esta el dolor en su culo?" They looked shocked, turned red and said, "OH NO!" and I immediately realized I asked them "Where is the pain in your asshole?" confusing culo (asshole) with cuello (neck). I apologized profusely and they couldn't stop laughing about it during the whole appointment. Good times.

A friend of mine was doing work-study in France and thought she was offering to show her coworkers her cat. Thankfully her coworkers informed her that she was being more than just friendly and how to actually offer to show her feline.

Guy I worked with when younger, at a restaurant, primarily a Spanish speaker. He kept telling me that another one of our co-workers "won the race"... I had no idea what he was talking about. "He win the race, he win it!"

What race? Eventually he expands to say it was easier to say in Spanish, but basically if there was a race to be fat and ugly, this guy would win that hypothetical race.

He was very pleased with himself.

getting a handy in Germany is not what you think it is

This happens within English too.. I'm a climate scientist, and I was working in consulting talking to some financial risk people. They were asking us for a "conservative" risk figures. In climate science that would naturally mean a low warming projection. For them it meant being conservative in their appetite for risk, so actually more like a worst-case example. That one took a couple of heated meetings to figure out.

I was snowboarding with some French exchange students. They used a lot of slang. On the chair lift we saw somebody fall hard and flat, what we might call a “yard sale”. One of them said “Quelle bordelle”. I asked what it means he said “what a mess”. Later that year, my parents also had a French exchange student, and his parents were visiting and they didn’t speak much English. We were at the beach and I was describing all the seaweed from the storm and of course it’s a mess on the beach. His mom was a bit puzzled when I described the seaweed as resembling a brothel. You know, a mess, like trash, refuse, rubbish.

Portuguese in Portugal has a slang word for queue, which is exactly the same as the Brasilian Portuguese slang word for queer.

I have on more than one occasion had to explain to Brasilian acquaintances that I had not just stated I was going to visit a queer person but that I was going to stand on a queue.

Me. A white boy teenager.

My best friend. Child of first gen Chinese immigrants. Fluent in Cantonese and English. Compared to his parents, he is very westernized. Can I call him a Twinkie? I mean, we aren't friends anymore, but that seems like an "our word" kind of word, and that's not mine.

Anyway...His parents own a Chinese restaurant. He gets me a job there in high school.

One day, my friend calls to me by my full name. One of the chefs hears it and repeats it to confirm what he heard.

It's at that point, dear reader, that my friend realizes that, if said with a Cantonese inflection, my last name sounds exactly like a common vulgarity of that tongue.

I won't say what it is, because it's a pretty uncommon name. But I will say that for several weeks after that, every single time I walked into the kitchen, I'd be greeted by all the cooks like Norm walking into Cheers.

It was actually nonverbal - I didn't understand the so-called "Indian head wag." Working with a lot of programmers from India, I was often faced with that sort of gyrating head gesture while explaining something. To me as an American it kind of means well yeah sort of, or okay but not really - but in India it indicates understanding, like a simple head nod in America. I couldn't figure out why so many people seemed to think I was being unclear. I would repeat things or say them in a different way, and sometimes they would do the head gyration even more - turned out they were just saying okay.

Loose fit, but my family lived in Australia for a few years. We're German. One night, my dad feels like a shake after a long drive to a vacation spot, so he drives up to a McDonald's and orders, the rest of the family dozing in the car.

"One erdber shake, please."

"Excuse me?"

"One erdber shake, please?"

"... I don't understand."

At this point my mum realized.

"Oh, a strawberry shake!"

We all have a bit of a laugh. He said the German word for strawberry, but pronounced it English. None of us in the car realized and we all understood. The lady in the drive through said she thought they invented a new flavor she didn't know about.

He also swaps the th and s in Thous Australia. :)

The other day there was a girl on the train responding to the conductor saying "Nächster Halt, Itzehoe" (next stop, Itzehoe), which sounds exactly like "It's a hoe". She went "It's a what!?" with her companion cracking up immediately.

Not exactly a misunderstanding but... my dad (a professor here in the U.S.) had a close friend and colleague, a Spaniard, who would go off to an intensive language summer school thing every year to teach American college students whatever esoteric Spanish literature was his specialty and only spoke Spanish the entire time.

Whenever he got back, he would spontaneously start talking to us in Spanish, suddenly realized we didn't speak Spanish, then restart again in English. It didn't embarrass him or anything, but it amused me when he did it.

Have a coworker who regularly says "Choca my life," to brush off little annoyances. He'll also say "Choca your life" in a sing-song gallows humor way to express sympathy for annoyances other are going through.

Anyway, I had just started at the job and we were having a Thanksgiving lunch where everyone was going to bring a dish. I was going to bring a Sopapilla Cheesecake and he was excited about it, but the night before the meal when I went to turn the oven on it wouldn't heat up (turned out to be a bad breaker).

The next morning I'm telling the story and appologizing for not bringing the desert, and he comes up and says "Choca your life!", which I hadn't heard him say before.

What I heard was "Choke on your lies!"

I was thinking this guy was serious about his cheesecake.

One of my 2 am cringe memories involves loudly asking my 3rd grade classmates if anyone would like a kiss.

I meant the chocolate.

I also had a fun experience in Belgium where a guy at a bar approached me and we each just tried different languages until we landed on one that we both knew. (I know this is common in Europe but you don't run into this in North America as often)

He looked appalled and after I asked why he had that look, he asked what I was going to do with someone's shit.

This is the shit.

Some years ago I was learning Chinese, I was excited and eager to practice after learning only a couple phrases, so one day I see this young lady handing out flyers downtown, I confidently approach her and say "ni hao!" and she replies "I'm Korean". To make things worse the flyers were actually from a Korean learning institute.

About 20 years ago I spent the year after high school in Europe. Went backpacking to Italy with friends, one of whom was absurdly handsome, not all that bright and quite forward.

Well, in Rome we met a group of pretty girls who spoke no English but with sign language and a phrase book we figured they were visiting Rome as part of their high school graduation fun. Got a number and promised to meet them in Naples.

Fast forward, we arrive in the evening in Naples with no plan or place to stay hoping to connect with these girls.

We find a payphone, handsome fella grabs it and starts dialing. And then we hear:

"Uhhhh. Ci? Is... Uhhh. Shit. Is your daughter there? Your daughter? Hot daughter? Phone? Fuck. IS YOUR DAUGHTER THERE? I'm the guy from Rome? FUCK!"