...and still not get ahead!
I made a new video – I look cool in it! Want to come up and
check it out? Sounds like an innocent enough thing to say, right?
While talking to a German friend of mine (a girl, but
seriously just a friend and one I’ve had for many years), I wanted to say this
pretty simple phrase. Through the very unwise use of the word geil (normally
cool/awesome) and kommen/bei mir (normally, come & my place), what I
actually somehow said was that I was horny and I wanted her to come inside me.
And that’s come with sexual intonations.
That has been my biggest D’oh! moment in the last few weeks,
but it definitely wasn’t the first time.
For example, when learning Spanish, I
managed to tell the first Mexican I ever spoke to in Spanish that I like to
shag/screw the bus every day. What can I say, it’s a weird fetish I have (apparently).
I’ve told people I’m a girl hundreds of times due to gender
agreement hiccups, and in France I complimented a bunch of people I had just
met as having a nice arse (merci beau-cu(l)). At least I never got pregnant in
Spain, unlike some of my unfortunate male friends.
These kinds of mistakes are the horror stories you will have
heard many times before about learning a language, and I’ve made way more than
I could possibly think of examples to illustrate. And I’ve done them in person
with natives. I always seem to unintentionally find a language’s hidden sexual
innuendos and produce them quite innocently and cheerily and usually in the
most cringe-worthy of situations.
– Benny the IrishPolyglot
fluentinthreemonths.com
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