Bonus points for examples from English and bonus points for any personal stories.
When I was first learning Dutch, I (obviously) wasn’t very good. Trying to ingratiate my self to my future wife’s parents I said "dat is een mooie geil jurk. " Which I thought meant, “that is a pretty yellow dress.”
Instead I said “that is a horny yellow dress .” Geil is horny; geel is yellow. I still don’t think my in-laws have ever realized I made a mistake.
Dutch diphthongs are hard, kids.
In Polish: ścieka and szczeka. The first is for dripping and the other for barking.
Or kieszonka and kiszonka. The first is a small pocket and the other sauerkraut
huur and hoer in Dutch. the first is rent and the second is whore.
I’m an absolute outlier at work (IT), as I’ve never even seriously tried modern gaming, let alone GTA.
It’s ironic, as I was big into 16-bit gaming until I was 15 in the 90s, but where I live it was social kryptonite and when drinking and the opposite sex came along I didn’t have enough social cachet to stay involved, so now I’m the odd one out, and I kinda regret being so swayed by what other people thought.
In my 30s I dipped into Portal and a few games but have literally never played an open-world online game.
However, my kids are nearly teens and love their gaming (albeit not GTA yet), so I’m planning on having a renaissance at some point, but who knows, maybe it’s too late. Definitely feel like I missed the boat.
Feel free to tell me what bugs you about my post, downvoters. I didn’t intent to piss anyone off.
(I’m not one of the ones who downvoted you, but your comment has nothing to do with the topic of the thread. Methinks you’re not in the thread you thought you were in.)
Italian “anno” means year, “ano” means anus, so forgetting to pronounce the double consonant can be awkward.
“Ho trenta anni”= I am thirty, or I have 30 years.
“Ho trenta ani”= I have 30 buttholes.
For my English bonus points, although I think its more of a slang issue in the southern U.S., “naked” means without clothes and “nekked” means without clothes and horney or otherwise “up to something while nude.”
And now that I’ve typed that, things with lots of spike or horns can be described as “horny” while you can also use that word to describe being sexually aroused.
excuse me in chinese is very similar sounding to being tired, if you dont use the tone right.
The Chinese question for “have you eaten yet” sounds extremely similar to the Korean 네 시발놈아 which in Korean means something similar to “you’re a motherfucker”
Japanese kawaii (cute) and kowai (scary) is pretty amusing
Friedens kowai yo… kurai yo in the mimic healed that misconception
oh wow, as someone that watches anime often, yeah now kinda recall many instances of that.
I noticed that kawaii sound very close mandarin’s 可爱 (kě aì) but then was a bit confused by it when later a monster shows up or something to that extent then then i feel like they said the same word, but judging from context and intonation (and subtitles was on of course), I just assume it originated from 可恶 (kě wù) and the sound just shifted over time due to geographical separation.
Unrelated: When I first heard Daijoubou, I thought it was supposed to be 大家没事吧 cuz the dà jiā sounds very close to Daijou
I feel like half the time I just make assumptions about a Japanese word’s etymology based on a Sinitic language and try to encode it to memory that way. I mean whatever helps my brain make sense of foreign words and so it kinda served as a memory aid thing. Cuz like Japanese sometimes has words that sound so close you can just map it to another language you already know with some made up etymology regardless if its true lolm
For government, admin, science, etc. if you can guess how middle chinese (a wu variety IIRC, but I might be misremembering) would have evolved in Japan, you’ll probably be right.
Not really a misunderstanding, but:
Me, entering into a room of Argentinian geophysicist coworkers, without knowing spanish: “Good morning senoras!”
Coworker: giggles. “Senores”
Me: “Why?”
Coworker: explains gendered nouns in Spanish.
Me: “Ah, OK, let me try that again; Good morning senoras!”
Coworker: “Oh, fuck you…”Just typical banter between coworkers who had been working together for years.
So in most Spanish speaking countries the word
papayajust means the fruit nothing crazy. Then you visit Cuba and suddenly the word means something vulgar about women’s genetalia. So instead they use the Taino phrase “fruta bomba” aka bomb fruit in English.In Spain and some Caribbean countries the word for pound cake is “Bizcocho”, but in Mexico it means something similar to papaya in Cuba. There’s a whole lot of these and it’s always a fun time when I say them not knowing when I travel thinking I’m getting away with being seen as a native.
TBF pound cake is an interesting phrase on its own.
When saying cheers (or responding to a sneeze) we say ‘egészségedre’ (=to your health, literally meaning to your wholesomeness). The weird cluster in the middle is sz+s, which is confusingly a s + sh sound. Someone learning the language once pronounced it more like egész seggedre, which means to your whole ass.
Then there are a bunch of words that sound like English words but they aren’t, such as our word for ravine, which is szakadék, but sounds a bit like suck a dick.
In Haitian Creole, the word for lawyer and avocado are the same. While we were living there, a friend got in an accident. He couldn’t figure out why the police kept asking him if he wanted an avocado. Police: eske ou vle yon avoka? Do you want a lawyer? Friend: Non. M pa grangou. No. I’m not hungry.
In french too, avocat
About 70 % of the words in Creole came from France. As they brought in slaves from many different African countries (so they wouldn’t have a language in common to revolt), the slave created their own language. Part French, part African, part indigenous.
In German, ‘schwül’ is a way to describe the weather when it’s muggy outside. On the other hand, ‘schwul’ is how you would describe a friend of Dorothy.
As far as I know, they used to be the same word, because gay men were said to be warm. See also “warme Brueder”
Since japanese kawaii/kowai is already taken, I’ll add chikubi (乳首) and kuchibiru (唇) are confused by some learners (including me at least twice). Nipples and lips respectively.
I also messed up the words for jealous/envious and selfish so told someone their vacation was selfish (or at least talking about it) instead of that I was envious.
I recently learned the words for oyster/persimmon and rain/candy are very similar. I had a Japanese person repeat them for me and I still can’t really tell the difference.
For candy, this is why I think remembering the loanword for candy ( キャンディ kyandei ) can be kinda nice. Allows you to get some clarification by asking if that’s what they’re actually talking about.
it’s pitch accent. There’s nothing different about the sounds the characters make (ka and ki or a and me), but the pitch contour is different. For extra fun, those pitch accent patterns vary across Japan and may be opposite in some places.
Yeah that’s what was explained to me but the differences were so subtle I can barely hear them. At least with the way the Japanese person spoke them to me.
The term you’re looking for is false friends. Eg:
- In Spanish, embarazado/a means pregnant, not embarrassed. Accidental mpreg is more likely than you think.
- In French, excité(e) is more likely to be interpreted as sexually aroused than excited. Draw your own conclusions.
Embarazado in spanish has both meanings, being pregnant and being embarrassed.
Edit: in any case, it is still odd to use it that way.
“Estoy embarazada” 100% equals “im pregnant”… “estoy embarazado” would still be odd.
To express embarrassment, we usually divert it not to us but to the origin of the embarrassment
“Que situación embarazosa”
I remember in class we were learning / practicing what you say when you meet up with another person after a long time. some one said «ah! ça fait longtemps qu’on ne se pas vu! Je suis excité…». they were corrected on that by the teacher.
I might be getting some of that phrasing wrong. my ability to write French is slowly degrading (I can speak it well enough, but not as well a a few years ago)
