Anecdotes, embarrassing or otherwise

Community-Created Courses General Language Chat
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Learning a language is a journey filled with rewards but also with its fair share of stumbles and falls. :blush: Have you got a story to tell, either of embarrassment or triumph? :muscle:

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Yes well, a few years ago when I was taking the Spoken part of my IELTS test, I was asked to talk about something that was important to me. I proceeded to talk about animal welfare and how I have rescued and nursed orphaned cats and dogs for some years when I completely blanked out and used the term “dog babies” instead of puppies. Not a biggie, but definitely something that embarrassed me at the moment. I must have done well, though, because the examiner asked me to write down contact details to a few shelters so he could look into adopting a dog baby himself :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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:laughing: That reminds of one a roommate once told me. He was working in Carnaby Street and he gears all sorts of things. Once, this lady asked him, “Do you have any hand shoes?” He was :confused::confounded: and it took him a few long seconds before the light bulb flashed: gloves! :laughing:

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Reminds me of the time I was in Kenya with a girlfriend who was fluent in Swahili, and we were putting on sunscreen when a young boy asked what it was. She realized she had no words in Swahili for sunscreen, sunburn, or any related concepts. She tried to tell him it was for reducing the pain of the sun, and couldn’t quite get across to him why it would not do him any good - he probably thought it would just make him feel cooler in the heat or something. (His skin, like most locals, was naturally sunscreened far beyond what any artificial sunscreen would do for us white people)

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the lady was of German or Dutch extraction, probably :grin:
de handschoen [m] | de handschoenen [p] = der Handschuh | die Handschuhe [p]

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The husband and I recently spent a month in France. My French is still at beginner level, but i managed anyway to have a few conversations - albeit short and stilted - with the hotel cleaning lady, the butcher, a few shopkeepers, and so on. It’s really cool when you can actually get your point across, no matter how stilted, in a foreign language that you’re still learning. :slight_smile:

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I like the way you say the husband…:yum:

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I think we have all had embarrassing moments when dealing with new languages/cultural situations. I remember a long time ago when I thought I would surprise a good friend of ours with my “new” conversational Mandarin capability (our friend is native Taiwanese).

For some reason when she came to the door, I blurted out “洗澡嗎 ?” (xǐ zǎo ma ?) instead of “你好嗎 ?”( nǐ hǎo ma ?), and she looked at me very strangely with a very embarrassed face.

Turns out what I said (translated) was akin to “do you want to take a shower ?”, rather than “how are you ?”. (She may have felt she was unclean, or that I was somehow propositioning her.)

I felt embarrassed too, once I realized what I had said, and apologized (in Mandarin and English many
times). A few minutes later we both laughed about it. We still joke about it every once in a while, since I
continue to make mistakes like this as I struggle with new Mandarin words and phrases.

We all struggle at times, whether it be with languages or other forms of learning, but the true measure of learning is not in the struggles, but in the triumphs. And sometimes triumphs only come after the struggles !

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@pdao :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:
Mandarin is really tough with each intonation meaning something different… I’m sure everyone learning it must have their fair share of embarrassing moments! Let’s hear them!

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In my host-family, in China, more than 10 years ago.

I was given the opportunity to eat snake some day at a local restaurant. So, happily, I told my host-mother afterwards I ate 蛇 (she, second tone). However, I mispronounced and said 屎 (shi, third tone) which means… feces, excrement. In my defense, they really sound VERY much alike, especially for a non-native ear. For a native though, it’s a world of difference.

You should have seen her face…

The fact that I was trying to use my hands to describe something long and thin was not really helping my cause :slight_smile:

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Oh, holy sh*ts…oops, I mean snakes… :laughing:
Can one learn Mandarin is one’s tone-deaf? :cold_sweat:

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Being tone-deaf, whether in singing or not, can just be from a lack of training. It’s the same for learning any new sounds in a language, I couldn’t tell the true sound of ø/ö or y when I first started learning Nordic languages. But a lot of people don’t put in the effort, or don’t ever get a native speaker to really help them learn how to distinguish between the sounds, and then they just give up and decide it’s impossible. (Swedish is a tonal language as well, though it really only has 3 tones, and in many cases you can say things wrong and they’ll still understand you.)

The closest embarrassing story I have to one of these is when I said I wanted “pipar” (a dirty word) instead of “peppar” (pepper) at the dinner table; since I had learnt it in Icelandic first, where the word for pepper is “pipar”…

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@risgrynsgrot

Indeed, I confirm, adequate training can help you overcome the tone-deafness because of the environment you grew up in.

These videos are a great intro into understanding some of the science behind it.
https://fluent-forever.com/chapter3/#.Vyj2MSMrJhE (Tutorials 1, 2, 3 & 4 on this page).

I like this guy because he sounds pretty humble to me (unlike the people on some of the other “language-guru” websites) and he explains things pretty well. The fact he’s an opera-singer helps for the topic at hand. He also made a lot of (paid) language-specific tools to learn the new sounds/tones of your new language.

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I never make the same mistake twice. I make it five or six times, just to be sure. :slight_smile:

You are all invited for a meating (meeting).:yum:
Have you hunger? (Are you hungry?) :hamburger:
Let’s prick a date. (Let’s set a date.):two_hearts:
I tried to lead you around the garden. (I tried to lead you up the garden path.):rose:
Don’t let the cheese eat off your bread. (Don’t let them eat your lunch.):bread:
Sorry, my computer runs fast…my computer gets stuck.:computer:

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Haha :grin::sweat_smile: Especially like the Let’s prick a date :scream:

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@ChiewPang “Let’s set a date” is in dutch: “Laten we een datum prikken of afspreken”.
“We always get what we want” is in dutch: “We krijgen altijd onze zin”.
Famous translation: “We always get our sin” :imp:

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Same thing, no? :smile_cat: :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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Bonjour … et bienvenue sur ce site. Je vais essayer de vous aider si je peux . .Je suis Français et j’apprends l’anglais of course. .eh eh eh

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I was, many years ago, visiting some Dutch branch of the family; at certain point, the cousin said: let’s walk the doggies. As soon as we were on the river bank, the male doggie started fooling around. To this my cousin shouted “knappe hond”, well in fact “knape hond!” (Dutch “hond” = German “Hund”.)

It took me some good minutes to realise that he did not want to say that the dog is scant or scarse or short (this is what knapp would be in German), but that the dog is smart. He was obvously shouting “smart dog!”

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In almost every language I’m learning, I can always remember the word for “forget” but always forget the word for “remember”… French is a perfect example. I know “I forget” is “j’oublie”, but I have to look up “I remember” every single time I want to say it. :smiley:

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