funny thing about languages

As the saying goes, "a little knowledge is a deadly weapon ." When I went to study in Spain, many years ago, I couldn't speak that well, but I knew the basic rules of grammar. One is that 'generally' nouns that are feminine end in the letter 'a'. Well, I wanted a chicken sandwich and since we generally eat hen, I applied that rule when I ask the deli worker "Quiero un bocadillo de polla." After a minute or two of his staring at me, my memory flashed back to what my more experienced roommate had taught me. pollO is chicken BUT pollA is a very vulgar way to say penis. Needless to say, I clucked like a chicken to clarify the situation.

Not quite so embarrassing but annoying was when I was in Israel. I was constantly turning to see who was calling me since the short form of my name Kendrick is Ken - Hebrew for yes.

The Barilla Pasta Company used to have some terrific recipes on their English-language web site. The kind where the translation was not necessarily done by someone who is bilingual. I particularly enjoyed the ones that called for "gloves of garlic" and "polyps." It's mostly been cleaned up , but there are still a few polyps around. The recipe for Casarecce with polyps, beans and cherry tomatoes tells you to "Choose the smaller type of polyps because they will be softer than the bigger ones." "Beat the polyps for about ten to fifteen minutes with a meat pestle to soften their meat." and "Wash and remove the polyps skin then chop them into pieces."

In case you are wondering, here are some pictures of the Italian original--polpo singular; polpi plural

Mine doesn't really fit with the OP, but with viaggero's example in #20.

An Italian girl spent some time in Zanzibar, doing research on "black and white dolphins". She also learned some Swahili and was eager to use it. Unfortunately, the Swahiul word for dolphin sounds very similar to a slang term for dolphin (pomboo) is easily confused with the term for testicles (pumbu), so for quite some time she was happily telling everybody who wanted to know that she was studying black and white testicles. She may have been doing that in her free time...

And another one that fits more closely in with the OP:

A while ago, a German friend of mine was renting out rooms in her flat to foreign business men during trade fairs. Once she had two American guests, who were a bit wary about German food to start with, and on the first morning - she was still a bit sleepy, obviously, because her English is normally excellent - she offered them some "boiled eyes" for breakfast. When she saw their shocked expressions, she quickly added "You can have them fried or srambled as well."

Explanation: The German word for "egg" - Ei - is pronounced like English "I" or "eye"...

Oh dear, messed up the joke in #22 by not proof reading: Pumbu means testicle(s), not dolphins, of course, and is easily confused with pomboo if pronounced sloppily.

And it's Swahili, not Swahiul...

There's another lovely story about an Englishman in Paris who was convinced everyone there was obsessed with The Smiths' guitar player Johnny Marr as they continually name-dropped him.

"J'en ai marre" of course is a common way of saying "I'm fed up" or "I'm sick of it" in French.

I understand that Sean and Jason Connery have had problems being taken seriously in France.

Having just enough Spanish to really mess things up, I tried to speak with our house keeper when I could. Some of my plants has died and I meant to tell her that the plants were muerta (dead), but instead I told her they were mierda (vulgar slang for feces) How embarrassing, but the look on her face was priceless!

Edited by: misskittyk

when in romania i was struggling with the three different pronounciations of the letter a: without an accent, with an accent that looks like a hat, and with one that looks like a cup. sublte differences phonetically to an english speaker, but worlds apart to a romanian native speaker.

while in a restaurant i asked the waiter for some lemon (in romanian containing one of the diabolical accented a's) and got a shocked look in return. woops - i'd mispronounced the accent and actually asked him for oral sex!

Tell us the exact words, please and how you found out about your mistake. ;)