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While buying a new suitcase in Paris I was asked "How do you like this one?". It was just what I was looking for so I thought I responded "I like it very much!". This apparently translated to <BR>"I would like to make love to the Suitcase".<BR><BR>Needless to say the laugher went on for quite some time. I still laugh about it today just thinking about it.<BR><BR>French is always tricky no matter how much you practice.
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Whenever a French person tried speaking with me in French, I would respond (in French) that I didn't speak French very well. No problem with this.<BR><BR>Usually, however, the French person would ask me something which I thought was "Are you English?" to which I responded (still in French) "No, I am American."<BR><BR>It wasn't until after I returned home that I realized what they were really asking was "Do you speak English?"<BR><BR>
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Sitting outside at a bar on Avenida Atlantic in Rio I said to the waitress "Eu gostaria de provar seu peito" wanting to try a sour drink similar to a daquiri that I'd had before on a previous South American trip. I knew something was wrong when the table of guys next to me burst out laughing and the waitress blushed. I don't speak Portugese and I had constructed the sentence using a dictionary . . . they told me that I said I wanted to sample her chest.
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This is a hilarious topic that I am enjoying very much, and making mental notes so as not to make the same mistakes!!!
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While in a hurry to buy a ferry ticket from Sorrento to Naples, I asked for uno bicchiere per Napoli - one glass to Naples. I was so used to ordering uno bicchiere vino rosso!
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I had learned some dialect words in a Southern Italy town from some new friends.<BR>I wanted to say you are a nice man to one of the older men at a nearby table in a cafe, but my new friend told me later I had said "you are a cat". I had wondered why he looked so puzzled.
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Second or third trip to Paris, years ago - I was invited to the very elegant Champs Elysées apartment of the parents of a friend - the night I had arrived. Place filled with priceless family antiques, dining room had a bell to summon servants, very hush-hush, you get the picture.<BR>First question the grande dame hostess askes me is how I am doing. I tell her without hestitation that I am suffering from a plunging neckline. I meant jet-lag of course. The silence was deafening.
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Three guys following us after midnight in Paris. Intending to say "conard" and instead saying "canard". At least calling someone a duck gave them the impression we were lunatics, and they left us alone after that.
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My first trip to France is memorable for two embarassing language moments.<BR><BR>The first was when I responded in the affirmative to a question posed by a waitress in a cafeteria that I understood to mean "Are you with the tour?" What she had in fact asked was if I was the tour leader - and my reply lead to no end of confusion.<BR><BR>The second faux pas was when I somehow got it into my head that the French word for glass was "une glasse". Well, I went all over Paris ordering "une glasse de vin rouge" and "une glasse de vin blanc, s'il vous plait" in my best high school French. It was not until I returned home that I realised that was not at all the correct word, and what I had been saying would have come out sounding like "une glace de vin" or a wine ice-cream!!!<BR> - I'm sticking to bottles now! ;)<BR>
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This isn't neccesarily something I said, but my reaction to something I didn't understand.<BR><BR>A couple of weeks ago we were playing fusball in a bar in Italy, and the guy I was playing against had just made some sort of mean comment about me. About 2 minutes later, he looked at me and said "perderai!" I thought he was trying to apologize for the mean things he had said just minutes before, (asking for pardon, sounds a bit similiar to what he said, in Italian), so i said "Si, si." as if to forgive him.<BR><BR>Instead, my english speaking friend looks at me and says "he just told you that you are going to lose (the fusball game)." And i had just said, "yes, yes." it was pretty embarassing, but funny.
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I confused the French word that meant mouse. I wanted to say smile. My hostess knew what I was trying to say and laughingly explained my error.
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I didn't say it, but my Spanish teacher told me about a major blooper. One of his students tried to say that she enjoyed running every morning (me gusta correr) but, instead she said me gusta correrme (this is a reflexive verb, rather than a transitive). Well, apparently, she said that she liked to have an orgasm every day and then compounded the error by explaining that she liked to engage in this activity "in the Plaza". You've been warned ...
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While in Venice, my husband and I decided that we would visit the casino there. The guide book specifically mentioned that in Italian, it's pronounced ca-ZEE-no. Ca-SEE-no is a whore-house. So, I go up to the old gentleman at the hotel desk and I'm concentrating so hard on getting the rest of the sentence right that naturally I end up asking how to get to the the whore-house. I'll never forget him staring at me over the tops of his glasses and giving me this "what did you just say young lady" face! I start sputtering ca-ZEE-no, ca-ZEE-no. It's funny now but I felt like an ass at the time.
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I'm back from Spain with a new embarrassing example (although I didn't say it, thank goodness). In languages like French and Spanish, there are reflexive verbs (e.g. in Spanish, to go = ir and to leave = irse). Sometimes the meaning is quite similar (eg the example above), sometimes it can be quite different. Our teacher gave the example of a female student who was trying to say that she liked to run in the morning (me gusta correr todas las dias), but instead she said me gusta correrme todas las dias). Apparently that meant that she liked to have orgasms every day. And then she compounded her error by telling another student that she liked to engage in this activity "en la Plaza Mayor" (the town square).
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When I first moved to italy, I lost my cat - he had jumped on the roof and escaped to the building next door. My mother in law brought a big burly guy over to hop onto the terracotta rooves to have a look. When he got there I asked him if he wouldn't mind climbing on the roof (potresti salire sul tetto) and instead I asked him if he wouldn't mind climbing on my t*ts (potresti salire sulle tette).
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I've learned a lot of languages through cassette study and am therefore totally self-taught. When I learn a vocabulary, I usually relate words in groups, such as opposites or pairs. For instance, I learn "good" and "bad" at the same time. It just seems easier that way. I was in Austria once at a sport-hotel and wanted to play tennis. I went to the lady who scheduled the courts, and having memorized the pair "yesterday" and "tomorrow" in German, I was ready to answer when she asked "when do you want to play?" The problem is, I got the pair mixed up and said in German, "I would like to play tennis yesterday."
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Actually, I said it in my native tongue. I am an American - travelling for work and having dinner with an Englishman. We were in the south of France but it was unusually cold. I wore a dress and commented that "had I known it would be so cold, I'd have worn pants". My English friend looked quite shocked. He told me I had just confessed to not wearing underware!
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A German teacher asked me once "Was ist los?" which means "what's wrong?" I was a little down so I replied "Ich bin blau," meaning I'm blue/in a funk. But I really said that I was drunk!
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my spanish was rudimentary when i complimented the host over breakfast he served for a group of us. "Me gusta sus huevos," i said bravely to gales of laughter from the chilenos at the table. I complimented him on his male parts, not the eggs. So today's leccion en espanol is -- "sus" refers to "your"..."los" refers to "the".
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In a Spanish jewelry shop I asked if they had "cadenas de platano," (chains made of bananas) rather than "cadenas de plata" (silver chains). No wonder they looked confused.
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