George Carlin talked about this, “Take a shit? You don’t takr a shit, you leave a shit! That’s the whole idea!”

I was snowboarding with some French exchange students. They used a lot of slang. On the chair lift we saw somebody fall hard and flat, what we might call a “yard sale”. One of them said “Quelle bordelle”. I asked what it means he said “what a mess”. Later that year, my parents also had a French exchange student, and his parents were visiting and they didn’t speak much English. We were at the beach and I was describing all the seaweed from the storm and of course it’s a mess on the beach. His mom was a bit puzzled when I described the seaweed as resembling a brothel. You know, a mess, like trash, refuse, rubbish.

My argentenian friend called stuffed crust pizza “the pizza with cheese borders”.

Still call it that almost 20 years later.

Another friend once thought twat was a synonym of twit. First time she called someone a twat in my presence I was gobsmacked but thought I must have misheard; there was definitely nothing twattish going on.

The next time it happened I made a note to raise it privately with her later. “You do know what twat means don’t you?” “Yeah, it’s another word for twit.” “Er, no.”

I have only ever heard the story, but my grandma came over here from Germany after WW2 to marry my grandpa (American Army) after they met in Germany.

Anyway, they are driving and she is learning English and she gets horrified and says, “THEY SELL THAT HERE?!”

My grandpa turns the car around and drive back to read the sign which had “pups for sale”. Because she was German and the U is usually pronounced with an OOH sound, well…she quickly learned how to say “pups” in English.

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.

getting a handy in Germany is not what you think it is

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.

This happens within English too… I’m a climate scientist, and I was working in consulting talking to some financial risk people. They were asking us for a “conservative” risk figures. In climate science that would naturally mean a low warming projection. For them it meant being conservative in their appetite for risk, so actually more like a worst-case example. That one took a couple of heated meetings to figure out.

Polish word for “searching” - “szukanie” - means “fucking” (the performance thereof) in Slovak language. This becomes a topic - and a source of amusement and confusion - almost every time people from these countries meet together, because how often these words are used.

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

Our Austrian exchange student told us “My sister wants to be a wet”.

The v sound is hard for German speakers

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.

Not exactly a misunderstanding but… my dad (a professor here in the U.S.) had a close friend and colleague, a Spaniard, who would go off to an intensive language summer school thing every year to teach American college students whatever esoteric Spanish literature was his specialty and only spoke Spanish the entire time.

Whenever he got back, he would spontaneously start talking to us in Spanish, suddenly realized we didn’t speak Spanish, then restart again in English. It didn’t embarrass him or anything, but it amused me when he did it.

I’ve made this mistake and apparently others have as well: the words for lips (kuchibiru) and nipple (chikubi) got mixed up in my head leading to some awkwardness in Japanese.