Then don't. Personally I'm amazed you're still alive (and sane).
I was in a post-office in France with my still rudimentary French.
A sort of queue seemed to have formed, but it wasn’t at all clear, so I try to ask if there’s a queue.
All I could say was “Est-ce que je dois rentrer dans la queue / should I enter the queue”), but pronouncing “queue” in such a way that I ended up basically asking “ est-ce que je dois rentrer dans le cul / should I enter the ass?” Only later did I understand the odd looks.
A sort of queue seemed to have formed, but it wasn’t at all clear, so I try to ask if there’s a queue.
All I could say was “Est-ce que je dois rentrer dans la queue / should I enter the queue”), but pronouncing “queue” in such a way that I ended up basically asking “ est-ce que je dois rentrer dans le cul / should I enter the ass?” Only later did I understand the odd looks.
]Thanks for doing that before I inevitably would've 
So living in Austria, I am continuously amused at the inability of postal systems (so far both US and French) to know about this little country neighboring Germany. They all think I live in the Southern Hemisphere. the U.K. Oddly seems to have no problem with this.
My mother once sent me a package from the US and it disappeared for over 2 months, it finally showed up with a rubber stamp saying "misdirected to Melbourne." I laughed at the time but this has happened several times.
I like to imagine some poor suffering civil servant with a stamp. All day long it's kethunk kethunk, misdirected to Melbourne, kethunk kethunk. I wonder what percentage of Australia's postal budget is taken up by sending mail onward to Austria.
The US postal workers give me a hard time about writing Europe on my address when I ship things from the US, but I've had too many "misdirected to Melbourne" instances to not do it.
My father now sends me things from France whenever he's there for business. You'd think it would be better because the words for Austria and Australia aren't the same in French, but nope. My father had to do a whole point at Germany on the map, then Austria, routine to get the postal employee to understand that this English speaker didn't want to send something to an English-speaking country.
Vienna tourist shops even sell "there are no kangaroos in Austria" t-shirts and bags. It's rather funny.
My mother once sent me a package from the US and it disappeared for over 2 months, it finally showed up with a rubber stamp saying "misdirected to Melbourne." I laughed at the time but this has happened several times.
I like to imagine some poor suffering civil servant with a stamp. All day long it's kethunk kethunk, misdirected to Melbourne, kethunk kethunk. I wonder what percentage of Australia's postal budget is taken up by sending mail onward to Austria.
The US postal workers give me a hard time about writing Europe on my address when I ship things from the US, but I've had too many "misdirected to Melbourne" instances to not do it.
My father now sends me things from France whenever he's there for business. You'd think it would be better because the words for Austria and Australia aren't the same in French, but nope. My father had to do a whole point at Germany on the map, then Austria, routine to get the postal employee to understand that this English speaker didn't want to send something to an English-speaking country.
Vienna tourist shops even sell "there are no kangaroos in Austria" t-shirts and bags. It's rather funny.
My personal linguistic mishaps have been buried by my fragile psyche in my subconscious, but I have one of my mother's:
She once horrified my very devout French grandmother (not biological) when she told her that the Pope had injured my then infant brother because she couldn't remember the word for blessed in French. She had used what she thought was a cognate a blessé, which means to injure.
She once horrified my very devout French grandmother (not biological) when she told her that the Pope had injured my then infant brother because she couldn't remember the word for blessed in French. She had used what she thought was a cognate a blessé, which means to injure.
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Etaoin Shrdlu
Guest
I was only in Austria for a couple of months, but had a letter from the US redirected via Sydney. An American who was married to an Austrian and lived there said it happened all the time. I also pointed out to an American host of an online forum that the poster he had invited to comment on some Austrian incident came from Australia. What made it funnier is that he insisted for a while that he hadn't made a mistake, and then the entire thread suddenly vanished, presumably because he'd found a map.
You've reminded me of the time I went to Innsbruck, which used to offer visitors free guided walking tours in the mountains, with the loan of walking shoes and a rucksack if needed. (Perhaps they still do, but I can't see anything about it after a brief google.) Most of the people who went were either anglophones or at least spoke better English than German; the guide could do his spiel in rough-and-ready English, but when I spoke to him in German, he saw his chance to be lazy and use me to interpret. Unfortunately, a tour guide's speech is full of all those funny Austrian directional words like umma or ummi which I can never keep straight.
You've reminded me of the time I went to Innsbruck, which used to offer visitors free guided walking tours in the mountains, with the loan of walking shoes and a rucksack if needed. (Perhaps they still do, but I can't see anything about it after a brief google.) Most of the people who went were either anglophones or at least spoke better English than German; the guide could do his spiel in rough-and-ready English, but when I spoke to him in German, he saw his chance to be lazy and use me to interpret. Unfortunately, a tour guide's speech is full of all those funny Austrian directional words like umma or ummi which I can never keep straight.
I laughed in tears with some of those stories. Thank you all for making my day. Here are two of my linguistic disasters that I can think of.
The first one happened to me in primary school. I was still just a kid and my class and me were taking our very first lessons in English. By that time we only knew just a few phrases. It might have been the beginning of the week, because I remember that it was my first day when I was a student in duty. I don't know if there is such a thing in schools in other countries, but what happened was that basically every week two students were chosen so that they could perform some simple tasks like cleaning up the blackboard after each class and reporting the teacher about absent students in the beginning of the other. The report in English class, was of course, carried out in English and the teacher expected from us just to say the sentence "Nobody is absent". We even didn't know the individual meaning of the words "nobody" "is" "absent" yet. She had never thought is how to point out the absence of someone because by that time there wasn't a need to do so. Unfortunately for me, some schoolmate got the flu the very same week I was on duty and the very same day we had English. So after a short consideration I made my attempt to inform her in English that there are absent students, telling her: "Yesbody is absent" with the most serious tone I got. She really tried not to laugh but ...
The second one happened to me when I was in Law school. There I had Latin class. Of course nobody takes the idea of actually learning Latin seriously which is a shame ...even the teacher only thought us how to decline first and second declension nouns and some phrases which we could need in our future studies. Most of the exercises were reading samples from Cicero, Gaius, Livy in that awful nor - ecclesiastical nor-classical pronunciation (I seriously don't know what was that even now but it totally butchered the language). So testis as the Latin word for witness is something that you can see in every row or two in these texts. During the first readings most of us giggled ... because the word was a phonetic equivalent of the word "testicle" in my native language (Bulgarian).
Here are two of my linguistic disasters that I can think of.The first one happened to me in primary school. I was still just a kid and my class and me were taking our very first lessons in English. By that time we only knew just a few phrases. It might have been the beginning of the week, because I remember that it was my first day when I was a student in duty. I don't know if there is such a thing in schools in other countries, but what happened was that basically every week two students were chosen so that they could perform some simple tasks like cleaning up the blackboard after each class and reporting the teacher about absent students in the beginning of the other. The report in English class, was of course, carried out in English and the teacher expected from us just to say the sentence "Nobody is absent". We even didn't know the individual meaning of the words "nobody" "is" "absent" yet. She had never thought is how to point out the absence of someone because by that time there wasn't a need to do so. Unfortunately for me, some schoolmate got the flu the very same week I was on duty and the very same day we had English. So after a short consideration I made my attempt to inform her in English that there are absent students, telling her: "Yesbody is absent" with the most serious tone I got. She really tried not to laugh but ...
The second one happened to me when I was in Law school. There I had Latin class. Of course nobody takes the idea of actually learning Latin seriously which is a shame ...even the teacher only thought us how to decline first and second declension nouns and some phrases which we could need in our future studies. Most of the exercises were reading samples from Cicero, Gaius, Livy in that awful nor - ecclesiastical nor-classical pronunciation (I seriously don't know what was that even now but it totally butchered the language). So testis as the Latin word for witness is something that you can see in every row or two in these texts. During the first readings most of us giggled ... because the word was a phonetic equivalent of the word "testicle" in my native language (Bulgarian).
EXCELLENT!
oh god, you're not alone
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Etaoin Shrdlu
Guest
I was hitchhiking through Belgium in the days before I knew anything much about the country apart from the fact that it always seemed to be between where I was and where I wanted to be. Not wishing to offend anyone with the wrong language, I chose Latin for my destination sign, in the form of GERMANIA . I thought this would be fairly transparent even to those without any Latin, though I was wrong on this front.
Once I got a lift from a lorry driver, who hadn't said anything since establishing that I was heading for Allemagne. At some point he excused himself, saying he wasn't very talkative. I was quite happy with the situation – a cab is a rather noisy place, truckers often speak non-standard versions of language, and my conversational powers are limited. So I said that was fine, as my French wasn't very good. For the first time, he looked at me curiously, and asked if I was Flemish. I said I wasn't. He seemed satisfied that I was just a dull foreigner, and we finished the journey in contented silence.
Once I got a lift from a lorry driver, who hadn't said anything since establishing that I was heading for Allemagne. At some point he excused himself, saying he wasn't very talkative. I was quite happy with the situation – a cab is a rather noisy place, truckers often speak non-standard versions of language, and my conversational powers are limited. So I said that was fine, as my French wasn't very good. For the first time, he looked at me curiously, and asked if I was Flemish. I said I wasn't. He seemed satisfied that I was just a dull foreigner, and we finished the journey in contented silence.
The funny part is that "verlernt" is grammatically completely correct; it's just the past participle of a different verb, verlernen, which means something like "forget" or "un-learn".
So it sounded as if you were telling him, "You used to speak such good German but now it's in a shambles -- where did your German get trashed?"
Yes, so he informed me (to my acute embarrassment
)
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Etaoin Shrdlu
Guest
I was in Leeuwarden, and wanted to buy a ticket for a French film. My Dutch is appalling, to the extent that it exists at all, but I decided to risk it in a situation where the limited options should make it relatively easy. Unfortunately the presence of the French title in the Dutch context threw me, so that I produced the linguistic equivalent of slipping on a banana peel whilst making an entrance. As I metaphorically got up and dusted myself off, the ticket seller gave me a benevolent smile along with my ticket and asked if I was Belgian.
No real Belgian could have made such a hash out of two languages in a dozen or so words, so I've never worked out what he meant. He could have been trying to provide some excuse for my ineptitude, but even if it was, I'm not sure whether that would be mitigation or further insult. Or perhaps he had never seen a Belgian – Leeuwarden is in the back of beyond, and doesn't get many tourists apart from a few Germans – and it was a good a guess as anything else. I suppose I'll never know.
No real Belgian could have made such a hash out of two languages in a dozen or so words, so I've never worked out what he meant. He could have been trying to provide some excuse for my ineptitude, but even if it was, I'm not sure whether that would be mitigation or further insult. Or perhaps he had never seen a Belgian – Leeuwarden is in the back of beyond, and doesn't get many tourists apart from a few Germans – and it was a good a guess as anything else. I suppose I'll never know.
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Etaoin Shrdlu
Guest
I suppose one can fail in one's own language. I had had blood taken by an incompetent doctor at a hospital; doctors are notorious for being poor at this, my veins aren't very large, and I had two rather bruised arms by the time she'd finished. So I went to the nearby pub to cope with the trauma. It was empty, so I ended up making conversation with the landlady, and told her my story, ending with the remark that it was fortunate that I wasn't a drug addict, as I wasn't great with my hands and had narrow veins.
People who work in pubs don't often listen to actual sentences – they're just alert for key words, which evoke a specific response. They're not big on jokes, either, particularly ones involving drugs. I had a bit of sympathy because my story mentioned 'hospital', and most people going into a pub next to one have their tale of woe associated with it. But I had now forfeited it by admitting that I was a drug addict, and had only come into the place to shoot up in the toilet or corrupt the youth. I was younger then, though, and hadn't realised a fundamental truth about life.
People who work in pubs don't often listen to actual sentences – they're just alert for key words, which evoke a specific response. They're not big on jokes, either, particularly ones involving drugs. I had a bit of sympathy because my story mentioned 'hospital', and most people going into a pub next to one have their tale of woe associated with it. But I had now forfeited it by admitting that I was a drug addict, and had only come into the place to shoot up in the toilet or corrupt the youth. I was younger then, though, and hadn't realised a fundamental truth about life.
Upon arriving for the first time in Rome I found myself in dire need of an Italian phrasebook, knowing almost nothing of the language. So I went up to someone, said hi, and asked something like "Dove se trouve un libro por novitsi d'italiano?" and the guy said, with a huge grin, "Ah, porno! Si, si, seguimi!"
Not my language disaster, but: THREAD: noctes-atticae-nostrae
The first picture reminds me of the elderly Scottish comedian, Rikkie Fulton, (now deceased) who said that once while he was in a massage parlour in Edinburgh the masseuse whispered in his ear, "Would you like super sex?" He replied, "If it's all the same to you, hen, I'll just take the soup."