That’s a little bit
Bowled it into a German restaurant to tell yhem I had a bag booked at 8pm
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Ich haben ein, bagen…bookeden?
A member of staff at Nice station had to book and then cancel tickets to Genoa three times as I kept fucking up the words for ‘tomorrow’, ‘today’ and ‘returning on Thursday’. After about twenty minutes I’d finally managed to get it right so she slammed the tickets down and, with that devastating mix of utter contempt and disdain the French do so, so well, hissed at me in perfect English “Your French is utterly appalling!”. I nodded miserably and slunk off.
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Using my Rosetta Stone-learned conversational Swedish, when my ex’s mormor asked me if I wanted anything else to eat, I confidently replied “nej tak, jag ar ful”
Mett is full. Ful means ugly.
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Ich habe eine Tasche gebucht?
(co-worker who refuses to make any effort to learn German despite working in Austria for 7+ years asked the waiter to tell her a story instead of asking for the bill. Erzählen vs bezahlen).
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In a fair few languages, if you say you’re literally full, it means you’re pregnant.
That would have been a nice surprise for granny.
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One from a co-worker who had been teaching little children in Vietnam. Vietnamese is a tonal language like Mandarin, so it’s very important to get pronunciation exactly right.
She found out she had been calling a little girl Idiot instead of her name for 6 months by mispronouncing it, and the girl was too shy to tell her.
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This explains why my wife keeps sending me the pregnant lady emoji everytime she’s been out for a big lunch.
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Mate of mine went on a stag do to Hamburg and knew only one German phrase:
‘Ich bin ein Kleiderschrank’
It didn’t seem to be a problem for him
In Strasbourg, six of us simultaneously forgot the French word for water while trying to order some for the table (nobody spoke French beyond GCSE standard in the first place, and we were a bit pissed).
The fucking waiter stonewalled us and pretended to have no clue what we wanted, despite it being really obvious from the context and us running through water, wasser, aqua…
He did us like kippers, tbf. Probably the most fun he had all night.
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lol/aww
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Bet he was piscine himself.
Does this work? Not really.
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Same trip, I ordered what I thought was a burger based on knowing about three quarters of the words on the menu item. Ended up with a sea bass fillet in a brioche bun, with a load of foie gras on top.
Close enough…?
Would eat.
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I got the Spanish word for “bill” mixed up with the Spanish word for “cunt”.
I asked for the cunt in a restaurant.
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fucking hell!
That’s not a small orange, either.