Ah, words that sound similar with different meanings… on the subject of German, I once wanted to say “no nuts, please” so I said “Keine Nutten, bitte”. As a result, my request for no whores was respected, and I learned that the German word for nuts is “Nüsse”
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Love the topic! But I don’t have any such stories come to mind now.
However I would like to share a story of a time when I was at the Frankfurt airport in Germany, attempting to get some change.
Now, I asked the vendor for change in English although I speak German too. But turns out she had some pretty interesting stuff to blabber behind my back in German. Basically she said she hated Americans and that they are dumb.
I couldn’t believe my ears! And I waited for her to hand me my change. Then I said in plain clear German: I suggest that you make sure those you plan on bullying are not polyglots 
.
Zeina
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Yes I heard that too! Was hilarious.
There is a book called Lost in Translation by Jost Zetsche that lists all the major translation mistakes that shaped our world. It’s on Amazon in case anyone is interested.
One notable mistake was one, which led to dispatching the Bomb of Hiroshima. Believe it or not, it was a translator’s mistake between Japanese and English that led to that event, which killed over 80000 people at that time.
Zeina
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Studying French at school, I went to stay with a host family in Nantes to improve my French. Somehow we started talking about food from McDonald’s, and the amount of chemicals they (at least used to, allegedly), put in their food. In English you would talk about ‘preservatives’. I now know that the correct French word is ‘conservateurs’. Except, of course, I said ‘préservatifs’… which is something entirely different 
(For those who don’t know, ‘un préservatif’ is a condom)
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A tip for Spanish speakers eating or having a meal in a Lusophone home, community or restaurant assuming that “Spanish is almost Portuguese”.
NEVER, dare to say “exquisito” for describing the food.
Exquisito en portugués no es sinónimo de “delicioso” es sinónimo de que vas a incomodar a todos a tu alrededor en cuanto empiecen a buscar algo “raro” en sus platos, o incluso lleguen a escupir lo que han masticado… xS
Exquisito in Spanish = “delicious food”
Exquisito in Portuguese = “weird, wrong, etc.”
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Haha, of course. When I started to study English I was talking to one of my friends. I told him I may broke my tongue and one of my colleagues bandaged it. And he continously was asking how she did it. And I couldn’t understand what was his problem with it. Then he realized that I wanted to say toe instead of tongue. 
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@David that reminds me of a very common spelling and pronunciation error in Irish, between cáca (pron. kawk-uh) and caca (pron. kahk-uh). The first means “cake” and the second means “shit”. 
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I went for a job interview at a cafe in Japan, and the interviewer asked me why I’d like to work in a Japanese speaking environment. I wanted to say that I’d like to improve my Japanese and become smarter, 頭がよくなりたいです.
I didn’t realise what I’d said until I was on the train home, but it suddenly hit me - I had actually said 背が高くなりたいです, that I’d like to improve my Japanese to become taller…
The interviewer never blinked an eye. Needless to say, I wasn’t called back
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I love this topic!
When I went on a language exchange to Japan last year I experienced two situations where I confused a word with a different one.
So the first situation was in class. Someone didn’t know the word “mafura” (scarf) and I tried to explain, but ended up explaining “makura” (pillow) instead. Needless to say, everyone was confused.
A few weeks later I came back home after a one-day trip to Tokyo and tried to explain to my host mother what I had experienced. I was super excited to tell her about the first “nabe” (hot pot) I’ve eaten in my whole life but for some reason I was saying “kabe” (wall) all the time so you can imagine the look on her face… 
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Unfortunately I have no story here to contribute, but I do love reading this thread in hopes of preventing some possible future mistakes myself 
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I have not done this, but I’ve heard of persons mixing up kawaii( 可愛い) and kowai(怖い).
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I was in French-speaking Africa doing a seminar on history, and I got to a part that was infused with the history of slavery. I’m white.
I discussed with my husband, who has worked in Africa for years, about how to approach this, especially since I have slave owners in my family line. We decided upon, “Unfortunately, my ancestors did terrible things to your ancestors,” and the confession/apology went from there.
When it came to that point in the seminar, I braced myself for impact.
Everyone laughed. I couldn’t even finish the sentence.
I tried again. They laughed again.
It wasn’t until midnight that night that I realized why they were laughing. I had said, “Unfortunately, my incest did terrible things to your incest.”
I went back and studied my nasal vowels after that lolololol
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We accidentally made that mistake in the presence of an old priest lololol We told him about all the “préservaifs” in American food and how terrible that is lolol
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This is a great topic!
A friend told me this one.
His friend was in a restaurant in China when he realized he lost his wallet. He immediately stood up and shouted I’ve lost my wallet! "我的包皮丢了！ 我的包皮丢了！"
Wallet in Mandarin is pibao (pi2bao1), but he switched the characters and said baopi (bao1pi2), which means… foreskin.
Apparently all the people around him started laughing. I think someone asked him, “How did you lose it exactly?..”
For me, a housemate and I were both taking classes at Jiaotong University in Shanghai. In the morning I asked her how we were planning to go to class. My Chinese was very bad at the time, and she said something about qiche. She pulled out some keys, and dangled them in front of me. I thought, wow, she’s got a car (qi4che1 汽车). Getting a ride to class would be great.
I went downstairs, and saw her push an old bicycle towards me. She motioned for me to get on it. Then I realized she meant qi2che1 骑车, as in “ride a vehicle”. As I started pedaling, she hopped on the back of the bicycle, and I ended up giving her a long and strenuous ride to school. I think I learned a lot about tones and about China on that trip.
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In a Spanish class, we played this game where somebody chooses a letter, and then everybody has to write words with this letter: a name, a country, a town, an animal, a foodstuff etc. - The letter was B, and I wrote burro (the Spanish word for donkey) under the heading “foodstuff”. Needless to say that I got some funny looks from my Spanish teacher. What had happened was that my mind had switched to Italian, where “burro” is butter …
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Many years ago, I was visiting my cousin in Mexico and he took me out to a restaurant he loved, because they had really good burritos. So after our meal I thanked him for letting me know about the amazing food there: Gracias por introducirme a estos burritos! (Thanks for putting me in these burritos!) My cousin just about choked laughing.
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This thread is gold.
I remembered another one…climbing a mountain with some friends in Japan, we were concerned about bears, so we stopped a passing hiker to ask if there were any bears on the mountain.
“Yama no ue ni kuruma ga arimasu ka?”
He gave us a concerned look and carried on without saying anything. We were confused, wondering if that was good or not. It wasn’t until later that we realised that we’d asked him if there were any cars on the mountain… kuruma = car, kuma = bear.
Oof.
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I’ll share this one from the italki archives - way back in 2013. italki was super small and scrappy (probably like 10+ people) and our friend Adam (who is in the video) wanted to help us out by trying to make a funny viral video. Basically the whole premise is rearranging the order of two words…
皮包 皮 (pi) 包 (bao) which means wallet
包皮 包 (bao) 皮 (pi) which means foreskin
Back then we didn’t have a marketing budget so we’d resort to doing ridiculous videos. The reactions are 100% genuine. I can’t belive this video hasn’t been removed from the internet 
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Oh yes! I have many in Mandarin. My favourite one is when I went out for an evening with a Hungarian friend. She introduced me to her Hungarian friends, and everybody was speaking Hungarian. I only knew a little bit. I said to somebody I hadn’t met before that I found a Hungarian word very funny and when I went to pronounce it, it sounded like a common swear word. The group couldn’t stop laughing and they kept asking me to say it over and over. That evening I finished up learning some more Hungarian!!
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Haha a new one… I have a back in my pain…
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