An example of what I mean:
I, in China, told an English speaking Chinese friend I needed to stop off in the bathroom to “take a shit.”
He looked appalled and after I asked why he had that look, he asked what I was going to do with someone’s shit.
I had not laughed so hard in a while, and it totally makes sense.
I explained it was an expression for pooping, and he comes back with, “wouldn’t that be giving a shit?”
I then got to explain that to give a shit means you care and I realized how fucked some of our expressions are.
What misunderstandings made you laugh?
My friend tried to call me a “night owl” because we tended to talk very late at night for my time zone. She accidentally called me a “lady of the night”.
EDIT: “lady of the night” is a term for prostitute
I don’t remember the details, but a similar situation on a ship with people from all over the world, resulted in my shift being called “vampire shift”. It was very suitable too, as I got up at sunset, and my shift was over around dawn. I liked it that way - it kept me out of the sun.
EDIT: This was in addition to the other shifts; day shift (noon->midnight), night shift (midnight->noon), and chief shift (0600->1800). My shift was a weird one that only I had so that I could overlap with both day and night and cover for the chief tech during his off hours.
Kind of like “graveyard shift”, which isn’t a funny translation, it’s commonly used (where I live) slang for the overnight shift. I like “vampire shift” better than “graveyard”.
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Friend: You’re a talkative owl-whore! 😂
You: ☹️
Not my story, but one a friend told me.
Someone had the misconception that there was a huge, huge sector of labor dedicated to working in cemeteries in the USA. Like almost everyone knew at least one person who worked at a cemetery. This misconception arose due to the ubiquity of the term “graveyard shift” regardless of the actual job being performed.
One time when I was a kid, we went on a long car trip and a thunderstorm approached. My dad said, “Don’t worry about the sound. It’s the light that kills you!” My Japanese mom was not cool with this. “No, it’s the sound. What are you talking about?” A fierce argument ensued.
So, the words for thunder and lightning in Japanese are kaminari and inazuma, respectively. But that’s not a perfect translation. kaminari means something like “peal of the gods”, and is the forceful, dangerous part. inazuma is basically just a light show.
English is the opposite. Thunder is just a sound, while lightning can kill you. To put it another way, in English, one word is light + electricity while the other is sound. In Japanese, one word is sound + electricity while the other is light.
Anyway, I was about to speak up when my big brother tugged my arm. “No. This is a popcorn moment. Don’t ruin it!”
They’re both wrong, it’s the electricity that kills you. Light and sound are just side effects.
Okay, but try telling that to the people who came up with the words a thousand years ago.
I made this comment about a year ago: https://midwest.social/comment/6247683
“A friend of mine is a non-native English speaker. He teaches at an elementary school and works with ‘English as a second language’ students. He casually mentioned that he always tells his students to take a ‘horse bath’ in the bathroom sink after recess if needed. He was traumatized when I told him that he’d misheard that phrase for his entire adult life.”
The Dutch word “poepen” (taking a shit), is a Belgian euphemism for sex. Which is always a great source of fun when making friends near the southern border.
I love that in my head im reading “poepen” as “poopin’” with a funny accent
Never really though about it but there are similar words in German “poppen” (colloquial term for having sex) and “pupsen” which is farting.
Hey, don’t judge the Belgians.
Yeah, take your hands off of them!
I used to work with a Ukranian coworker, who had so little of an accent that I often forgot he was not a native English speaker.
One time during a meeting, I mentioned “there’s more than one way to skin a cat” and I can still picture the horrified look on his face when he processed what I just said.
In all fairness, it’s a pretty morbid expression!
I have a Moldovan friend who does have a thick accent and had a lot of trouble saying “beach” and “beaches” for a bit.
Once he found out why people were laughing, he decided to keep saying he “loved going to Florida for the bitches” anyway.
I used to hang about with this Italian couple, and I remember smoking outside a pub with them years ago when I sort of offhandedly said “it’s like the difference between shit and sheet”, and one said “what’s the difference?” so of course I spent a good ten minutes trying to demonstrate the difference by saying “shit” and “sheet” over and over with them trying to copy me. The bouncer loved it.
We have a climate chamber ("Klima-Kammer in German) at work for testing products, and my Ukrainian coworker kept referring to it as the “camera”, I thought that was funny.
My Dutch friend. We were on discord playing guild wars and the topic of alcohol came up. The majority of the group are british and we were talking about different drinks like whisky, gin etc and the question came up “so what famous dutch spirits are there?”.
There was a bit of silence before he said, “I don’t know, William of Orange?”. Turns out he had never heard of the word ‘spirit’ to refer to high proof alcohol before so selected a famous historical dutch figure.
I could imaging a William of Orange rum. Bet it would taste pretty good.
The answer, of course is “jenever”.
The funnier answer is “witte wieven”
The majority of the group are british and we were talking about different drinks like whisky, gin etc and the question came up “so what famous dutch spirits are there?”.
In case you want an actual answer to that question, look up the history of gin.
This was a rather long time ago, my gin and oude en jonge jenever collection has rather grown since then lol
I went to the doctor because I was worried about me grinding my teeth (bruxism).
Instead of saying “hagishiri” or 歯ぎしり I said “hagEshiri” or ハゲ尻
so I told to the doctor I was worried about my bald ass.
Haha amazing.
An American, English speaking friend was told to order food in Chinese while we were there and ended up making the whole restaurant laugh when he very loudly let her know he was sterile. According to our hosts haha.
I heard a story of an American student in Beijing asking for “paigu mien” (pork rib noodles), but he rather confused the waitress by asking for “pigu mien”, bottom (arse) noodles!
I went to Mexico and told a lot of people that they don’t speak Spanish. When someone said something that I couldn’t hear well, I’d compliment their digestion.
Right phrase: No hablo Español (I don’t speak Spanish)
What I said: No hablas Español (you don’t speak Spanish)Right phrase: Que dices (What you say)
What I said Que diges (what digestion!)I think most people can guess as it’s very common to hear the “no habla” one.
I’ve got one though: A roommate told his new Spanish boyfriend that she wasn’t feeling like meeting his parents because she was “muy embarazada”.
Turns out that’s not embarrassed, that’s pregnant.
That’s a really common one here in San Antonio where people speak conversational Spanish but don’t know more formal words like that. One of my friends tripped and fell in front of her family visit from Mexico. It was at our graduation and she stepped on her gown. She said “estoy embarazada” and everyone freaked out, running to her aid. Her parents were really confused how their lesbian daughter got pregnant.
Es un milagro de navidad! (Navidaz?)
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So what is it? Is it beer? Another fermented beverage? Is it soda?
I had it once, and I thought it tasted like most subways smell.
It doesn’t seems very appealing.
Well to preface this, 6 months ago I moved to Japan to study Japanese.
During a trip to Tokyo I randomly ended up talking to a group of salarymen on the way to the same restaurant at me in akihabara. After a while they asked me if I live in Japan and I answered yes and then proceeded to say 日本にしんでいる instead of 日本に住んでいる, for those who don’t speak Japanese, I accidentally said I am dying in Japan instead of I am living in Japan which is surprisingly close pronounciation wise lol. This was met with loads of laughs
Haha i am just starting to learn Japanese and I gotta say its challenging but so fun. I love the grammar, at least as far as I understand it at this point. Like Yoda’s grammar it is.
The yoda grammar thing never really worked for me, the Japanese grammar is so different from the other languages I speak that I just could never translate in my head.
When it comes to Japanese, either I know how to say something naturally or I don’t, I can’t do convoluted English (or other languages) to Japanese translation in my head and then speak
I used to have trouble with RPN calculators until I realized it’s better to think in Japanese.
For example, when I go:
3 enter 5 plus 2 divide
I’m thinking:
san to go tasi-te ni-de waru
It just feels more natural.
My favourite story like that is from my dad, who was WW2 vet. After the war, he wound up in Japan and attended a conference where someone stepped up to the podium and introduced himself as General McArthur’s Chief Advisor. Or at least he thought he did…
The word for advisor is komon. The word for asshole or anus is koumon. Basically, you just hold out the first o out slightly longer and it switches to the other word.
I feel like this is too coincidental to be a coincidence.
To live and die in Japan, that’s the place to beeee…
I was in a sign language class (ASL) around Halloween and the instructor asked if we had ever encountered a ghost. We thought he signed tornado so we signed about times we were near tornadoes while he’s looking on with disbelief and shock and awe about all of our supernatural encounters. We had a good laugh when we figured out the confusion.
Was in Spain on a Spanish club field trip. I forget what I did as it was years ago but I wanted to express how embarrassed I was about something.
Used the word ‘embarrasada’.
Hilarity ensued.
Edit: Oh look! Other people in this thread did the same thing lol. I feel so much better.
We visited an office, and the person guiding us around told us about one of the employees that “it is his first day” - we all misheard this as “it is his birthday”. And started to sing…
it’s worse when you do speak the language, but your laziness in one language affects the other: in spanish, if you leave out the punctuation like it’s english, you could accidentally end up texting people that your potato is into anal gangbangs instead of into how much your dad likes new years parties. lol
mi papa disfruta fiestas por ano neuvo (my potato likes new anal gangbangs)
vs
mi papá disfruta fiestas por año nuevo (my father likes new years parties)
To be fair, ñ in Spanish is a whole letter by itself and not just a funny n. As in, it has its own entry in the alphabet, and it has a dedicated key on the keyboard. So even lazy people don’t write n instead :P
dedicated key on the keyboard
not on us keyboards; hence all the anal. i literally have to find a source to find ñ and á to copy/paste it. lol
As yes, I’ve told someone how many assholes I have before.
