Funny mistakes you made in a new language

[Serpent]

We were in Finland and my mum wanted some honey for her tea. The normal word is hunaja, but I used "mesi", which is more like nectar (some of its cognates are normal words in Estonian etc, *meci did mean honey in Proto-Finnic). I probaby used it due to an earworm from a folk rock song which mentions mesimarja (arctic raspberry).

[nooj]

I said figa (pussy) instead of figo (awesome) in Italian. Got corrected quick.

It's embarassing and all but I retain the words or expressions I get corrected on way better than learning by myself. I really appreciate these opportunities. I still remember corrections from years ago.

[Querneus]

I was going to open a new thread for this, but I noticed this thread already existed. Okay, guys, story time. (I'm doing this in chronological order, so the first one isn't that funny, but is still interesting to think about.)

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I started learning English when I was 9 years old. The third textbook I used in those classes would always finish a unit with a subsection entitled "About", followed by a question and some lines to write a small reflection about the question. I always dreaded reaching the end of a unit in class, because it meant that I'd need to write a paragraph in English and I didn't have the skill to say what I wanted to say. I wasn't even aware that bilingual dictionaries existed at the time. Since in Spanish you can't name a section with a single preposition like that, I thought "about" meant both "(acerca) de, regarding [something], relating to, concerning" and also "reflection, meditation", and because of the activity I started to feel fear whenever I saw the word in the book (although this dwindled as my English improved).

I developed a similar but milder apprehension towards the preposition "at" at the same time, mostly because I couldn't understand it. In fact I didn't understand it until after 8 years of studying English, when I got tired of getting corrected for it by my high school teachers in Canada, and finally had the idea of looking up explanations of "at" online.

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When I was 13, I liked going on forums to read about the videogames I played, even though I struggled to understand all posts with my 4 years of English. One day I was poking around a minor videogame forum I didn't normally visit, and when reading a general off-topic thread, a teenager there asked the other teenagers what they thought about "getting laid".

I knew "lay" in the sense of "to place [something], position, arrange", so I assumed they were talking about getting their body laid horizontally, 6 feet under ground, in a casket, accompanied by the wails and mourning of their friends and relatives. However, some of the teenagers replied making comments about "being curious about getting laid" and even "looking forward to getting laid". I never returned to the forum again, utterly horrified that people there were free to talk positively about committing their own death. I was a bit mystified, though, by some comments about some people's "first time" getting laid -- did these people undergo a sacrifice where they did a pretend-funeral or something? I just chalked it up as a weird small foreign religion, probably.

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Now I was 17 years old (with 8 years of English under my belt) and had recently moved to Canada. I was taking a physics class at school, and we were about to start our midterm exam when the girl who sat at the table to my left passed me a note saying "F*** ME SIDEWAYS". I had no idea what that meant, but that girl practically never spoke to me, so I assumed it was some kind of insult. I didn't react or reply. She tried to talk to me a few times during class later on, but I would always quickly cut the conversation, not wanting to do anything with her.

You can imagine how I felt when, three years later, I learned that what she wrote was a slang expression meaning "I'm nervous! I'm going to do badly [in the exam]!"

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This time, I was taking an upper-intermediate French class in college. It was a nice small class (~9 students), and that day we were discussing the concept of synonyms in French. I was feeling very bored (in fact, the whole class seemed quite bored), and at some point the professor asked the class for synonyms of magnifique 'magnificent'. My classmates gave synonyms like splendide and somptueux, and I raised my hand and said luxurieux, intending it to mean 'luxurious'. The professor gave me a surprised wide-eyed look, and made a pause, which I felt a little bit strange about, but I maintained my utterly bored face resting on my hand anyway. Nobody in the class reacted. She (the professor) just continued on after that.

Three days later, it spontaneously downed on me that luxurieux doesn't mean 'luxurious', but 'lustful, lewd'! Cf. Spanish lujurioso 'lustful; addicted to sex or making sexual jokes'. The French word I intended was the similar-sounding luxueux.

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Finally, on Saturday (two days ago), I went to an event with my girlfriend at a local planetarium, where we were supposed to lie on the floor. A surprisingly high number of people showed up at the event, and there weren't enough pillows so we'd have to improvise some pillows using our bags and light jackets. I said to my girlfriend, "ah! we should've brought a pillow for this", and she tried to reply in Spanish, meaning to say tú puedes ser mi almohada 'you can be my pillow :D'. However, she misremembered the word for 'pillow', and actually said almuerzo 'lunch', 'you can be my lunch :D'. I laughed it off and told her the correct word, but I admit I have been worried for the past two days wondering whether I might be dating a male-eating mantis or scorpion pretending to be a cute human.

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EDIT: A few hours later, I've been thinking this last story that's not actually about *me* but my girlfriend might possibly be too mean for her. I've decided to leave this post as I published it for now. Hours ago I thought it'd be funny to include the ridiculous comment at the end of the last story when I wrote this post, but I really don't intend to insult her or insinuate anything negative with the invertebrate comparison!

[Axon]

I should know by now that you can't just assume a concept will be the same between two languages. And yet sometimes I get cocky, and I think I have a feel for how some concepts might be expressed in Chinese. Take technology, for example.

Hard disk? Hard+disk. Camera flash? Flash+light. Notebook computer? Notebook+computer. Mouse? ...

And that's how I asked two separate salespeople for a "Bluetooth rat" today.

[badger]

I can't remember the context now, but I do remember, even thrty years later, telling the examiner in my GCSE French oral exam that I had worn "un château" (castle) before correcting myself to "un chapeau" (hat).

[SCMT]

ano =/= año

Just sayin'...

[Koneho]

I lived briefly in the Visayas. In the two months I was there, I had according to my memrise decks, learned about 1k sentences (no internet and nothing to do = study all day). As a result I have a passable survival Cebuano. It just so happens that my neighbors here in ~~~~ are visayans. They don't speak Cebuano as their L1, but the Visayan languages are on a spectrum similar to romance in Europe. Tagalog; always being the weird one out (atypical for a central philippine language) has some shared words with the other central philippine languages. The power was out and I was confused.

The neighbor looks at his wife and says "naglibot siya", which took me a hot minute to realize he meant "nalibot siya (tagalog)"; in tagalog libog means horny but in other central philippine languages it means confused.

And that, my friends is how I was briefly mortified that my neighbors (row house/terraced) heard more than I thought they did.