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?
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!”
This is fascinating to learn.
They’re both wrong, it’s the electricity that kills you. Light and sound are just side effects.
One time when I was a kid,
That’s how childhood and passage of time works.
When my wife was in university, she went on an exchange with a dozen other students to a Chinese university. The program assigned her group a pair of local guides.
The first night, the guides offered to take them out for snake. Everyone refused.
The second night, the guides repeatedly offered everyone snake, saying that there were plenty of local places to get snake. Everyone refused.
The third night, her group had a discussion. They didn’t want to offend their gracious hosts. Snake had to be a popular local delicacy, because the guides repeated their offer daily.
They decided to be adventurous. One of them spoke up: “yes, we would like to try snake…”
The guide said, “what kind of snake do you want? chips? hot dog?”
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
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.
koumon
My parents forced me to attend after school tutoring when I was a kid, at a place called “Kumon” 🤔
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.
To live and die in Japan, that’s the place to beeee…
my grandfather (polish) was talking to my cousin’s boyfriend at the time (german) in english. the poor guy was trying to make a good impression so he was really going the extra mile. it took about 10 minutes for them to realize one was talking about chess, and the other about jazz.
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
Geef me een klap, papa
Lol this reminds me of BBC Pidgin:
How is that headline about the woman and not the british man she invited over who threw poop out her second floor window?
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!
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.
They’re not wrong…
I heard a story about how in world war 2 British and American generals got into an argument about the importance of a certain matter.
The British thought the matter needed to be tabled and the Americans were shocked and thought it must not be tabled.
Took some time for them to realize “tabling” an issue meant the exact opposite in America and UK
Since hearing that story the exact expression came up for me online once and on a work call once with British and American speakers.
No foreign language, but still.
How the turn tables
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.
after hours gaming at work with awesome ukrainian colleague.
we all get regular beers from the fridge. ukrainian co-worker is sitting there and suddenly spits his drink all over the floor and looks utterly grossed out. He reads the label with scrutiny and says loudly ‘guys, vat thee fak is ROOT BEER?!’
oh how we laughed
Me learning ginger beer =/= ginger ale
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.
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.
Can I call him a Twinkie
The asian term for it is ‘banana’. Yellow on the outside, white on the inside. (Before the pitchforks come out, I’m one myself).
As a black guy I’ve been called “Oreo” for the same reasoning.
It’s coconut for Indians and South Asians.
In Spain, my first real long-term girlfriend. American. We are visiting some of my relatives. She speaks passable Spanish. My aunt ask her something. She replies that she’s embarrassed, but she uses a “false -friend”, Embarazada, which means pregnant in Spanish. Me knowing what was going on, let the thing run for a bit. When explanations came there was a hilarious bit of manga size eyes and laughs.
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.
Wow I’m gonna make “you’re fucking ants” a regular expression in my english vocab. I will provide no details when I confuse people.
Tbf mierenneuken is also a very odd expression to me as a Dutch person.
Huh. Maybe you could help me.
I’m listening to Stromae, Pomme - Ma Meilleure Ennemie (from Arcane Season 2) Lyrics w/ translation.
And one line is “Mais comme dit le diction: Plutôt qu’être seul mieux vaut être mal accompagne.”
French (sorry for butchering some of the letters, I’ve a Nordic layout), roughly for “But as the saying goes: Better than alone, is to be in bad company.”
Reading that, I remembered a Spanish line from last weeks episode of “The Day of the Jackal”: “Mejor solo que mal acompañado.”
“It’s better to be alone than in bad company.”
Opposite sayings?
A difference in views between the French and the Spanish?
Yeah, it does sound like they’re opposite sayings.
I wasn’t aware of the French saying, but was of the Spanish one, plus there’s one which is exactly the same as the Spanish one in Portuguese.
That said, feeding “Plutôt qu’être seul mieux vaut être mal accompagne” to DDG gives pretty much only results with the saying “Mieux vaut être seul que mal accompagné”, which is the same as in Spanish and Portuguese, so I’m thinking that the lyrics of the song are in fact purposefully reversing the well known saying “Mieux vaut être seul que mal accompagné” for impact.
are in fact purposefully reversing a well known saying for impact.
Oh. Well, that does explain it. Thanks.
To understand lyrics by Stromae you need to check the French version of the lyrics on genius.com as there are explanations added by friendly native speakers. The texts are full of connotation, context, idioms - I’ve not seen anything like it in any modern song. It’s very cumbersome to translate all of that but I found it rewarding. Especially the lyrics of Papaoutai and Bâtard are masterpieces.
Check out your best enemy here: https://genius.com/Stromae-and-pomme-ma-meilleure-ennemie-lyrics
I’m learning Dutch so I can eventually move there, what phrase is that? Wasn’t mentioned here
It’s “mieren neuken”.
A dutch person responding to my post already mentioned it.
Also, as somebody who has moved there first and then learned Dutch whilst living there, I do recommend just learning it over there since it’s a much faster way to learn a language when you’re there surrounded by native speakers, with lots of things written in Dutch around you and with Dutch TV and Radio whilst actually using it, than it is as just learning from the outside with little in the way of useful practice with the actual experts of the actual language.
Also you can easily get away with using English in The Netherlands whilst you’re learning Dutch - in fact if you have a recognizable accent from an English-speaking country it’s actually hard to get the Dutch to speak Dutch to you in the early and mid stage of learning their language since they tend to switch to English as most Dutch speak that very well.
Chatting on Skype with a Chinese developer, he said “I need to take Friday off for family matters” and I said “no worries”
He apologized profusely, and eventually I realised that to him, “no worries” meant something like “No! I am very concerned!”
I’ve since taught them some more Australianisms.
So many developers reporting “oy ya cunt”, quite often not even aimed at them as an insult.
Haha I sim race with several Aussies and Kiwis and I’m quite happy to be called a cunt by them because it usually means I won. “'Ow in the fack did yiu get tha leed ya cunt!?”
“cunt” is a term of “endearment” in Australia lol. It’s a cultural clash that needs to be explained quite often. I saw a similar culture clash with polish devs working for a US company. Poles like to vent / complain about their life simply for someone to chime in and say “I feel you, shit sucks”. Once a colleague vented about a minor annoyance. 3 days later we had a meeting scheduled about “problems in the project”. We collectively went “what problems lol”. Everyone was pissing their pants only for the US scrummaster to bring up the tiniest of annoyances as if it meant the end of the world / company.
Haha I know its an endearment, since we’ve all been friends for years now. One thing that got me recently was one of them talking about the new whipper-snipper he just bought and how quiet it was, being electric.
I had no idea what the hell a whipper-snipper was, but know a “whippersnapper” means young person where I’m from.
Turns out a whipper-snipper is the same as a weed-whacker / weed-eater in my part of the world.
That one is also in the states lol.
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.
