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Embarrassing Language Mistakes


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You know you've had one. Any language student will be able to clearly remember that one time so detrimental to their reputation and recall it with ease.

At least though, we can laugh :P

In french one time.. we were reading out loud to the class a passage in french, one person at a time. When it was my turn, I came across a word I had never seen before 'dehors', meaning in this context 'outside'. Not wanting to stop and ask what it meant, I took a shot at it. Now, normally, this would be pronounced 'dor'.. quite simple, but how did I do it? 'da-*****'

As soon as I said it I realised haha.. but at least the rest of the class thought it was funny, my teacher will never treat me the same though.

I know mine isn't that bad, and so I am sure there are worse! Tell me of your worst language moments.

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First day of Spanish ever for me [the other students had had 3/4 of a year of it]: the teacher gave a quiz on basic conjugation and vocabulary. She asked everyone to say their score out of ten. I got a zero, and she turned to me and said, "You didn't get ANY right?!"

Third year of Spanish--my teacher commending me for reading ever-so-slowly. We took turns reading from a book, and apparently, I was the only one who went slow enough to try to pronounce words correctly. I was like, "How's that a compliment?"

And then for my orals, I started talking really slowly. The last thirty seconds was complete improvisation, and my teacher called me out in front of the entire class! That was embarrassing, but whatever. My IA grade was pretty okay, and my IB grade rocked my socks off :P

I have to say, IB/AP kinda sucked the fun out of learning a second language for me. Just having a test at the end of the year which determined how much you learned, period caused the mentality of the class to be geared more toward beating the system rather than learning for the sake of learning.

Edited by sweetnsimple786
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Urgh.. just by remembering it makes me want to kill my self (not really, I don't mean that..)

Well, I'm a student from Malaysia, and taking English for the A2 subject..

There's once when my lecturer ask us to make an essay with the title going Green..

I make a serious typo and the essay was published on the English department board..

The typo I make is on the word organism.. and I miss the 'ni' making it orgasm..

Urgh... what an embarrassment..

:P

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I never had a seriously embarrasing language mistake, but my mum did. She can hardly speak any words in English correctly. And so, one time at my grandma's house, instead of saying "give me the peanuts" she said "give me the penis". No one understood that except me and my uncle, who had a priceless look on his face.

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  • 1 month later...

I take Spanish, and for some reason, whatever mistake I make will change what I say to some sort of sexual innuendo. One I couldn't remember the word for to give a hug or something, and I said "embarazada" because it sounds like it. That actually means to impregnate I think.

Another time I wanted to say a bird, which is parajo, and I ended up saying it in the feminine form. My teacher looked at me and told me that that means a sly woman. It was beyond embarassing.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Yesterday I was in Arabic class. I asked the teacher how this word is spelt. So When i asked him the word it came out wrong. It came out "Nipple" rather than the word I wanted, NO ONE noticed (since everyone in arabic class sleeps) but it was pretty feaky for me!

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I take Spanish, and for some reason, whatever mistake I make will change what I say to some sort of sexual innuendo. One I couldn't remember the word for to give a hug or something, and I said "embarazada" because it sounds like it. That actually means to impregnate I think.

Another time I wanted to say a bird, which is parajo, and I ended up saying it in the feminine form. My teacher looked at me and told me that that means a sly woman. It was beyond embarassing.

just to note, bird is pajaro ^^

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  • 3 weeks later...

well in french clas in 10th grade I was learning the basics (you know, what's your name, where do you live? etc.) so anyway when it was time to say where i live, I go "j'habite..." but I pronounce it " je habite" so the guy who was tutoring us informs me that I just told him I have a certain male body part that I don't think I could write here :P

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm being picky, but the subtitle of this thread is actually misspelled - mispronounciation should be mispronunciation <_<

As for embarrassing language mistakes, I don't think I've had any before (sure I've gotten some WRONG, but not embarrassingly). I do remember how I used to spell available as 'availible' though. It took me a long time to get out of that.

Oh and I used to mix up 'it's' and 'its'. I didn't even know I mixed them up; I think I thought they were interchangeable. Someone pointed out my mistake on my blog, and for some reason, it stuck :)

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When I was on homestay in Japan last year, I was in the car with my host family after going to the Nagasaki Peace Park, and they asked me what it was like, and I didn't know what the japanese word for sad was then, so I said 'omoshiroi' which means interesting, but then I realised that it also means funny...it was kind of awkward.

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Once I wrote shirts without the r in an English essay... twice <_<.

And Spanish A2 is just ridiculous. Despite the fact that most of the class has Spanish as a first language, spending all of our lives in a British school has taken its toll. We constantly get tenses wrong, try to translate things directly from English and get something very weird-sounding, etc. One of our grade descriptors actually says: Speaks Spanish in class... despite the fact that we're supposed to have a better grasp on Spanish than English...

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  • 1 month later...

Mine isn't really that funny, just a little strange.

We were doing a french translated text in english, le grand meaulnes and I couldn't pronounce meaulnes properly when asked to read aloud. And my teacher said it didn't matter because I don't take french and went on to explain that people who take the class should know... I went bright red and muttered I take french before everyone who was giggling mentioned that we all take french...

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Once in French class at the beginning of last year, we were discussing a movie we had watched in French. Yes, we were discussing in French. The teacher asked a question, but nobody had any type of answer. I attempted to give her one, but I ended up getting stuck on the French word for "to yell," because I didn't know it. So, in the middle of my sentence, I pause for a long time and suddenly ask the teacher, in English, "What's to yell in French?" She responded promptly with "crier" and I finished my sentence slowly, but it was still mighty embarrassing.

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Our English teacher in 8th grade mentioned during class a few mistakes a few people had done writing essays and so she mentioned that a girl had written "From the bottle of my heart". The girl, being a very outspoken one, quickly admitted that she was "guilty" and defended herself with: But I believed that was what everybody said! I think that was pretty sweet XD

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  • 4 weeks later...

I often find myself stuck when I'm speaking with my mum on the phone in German, my mother language. Happens to me so often that I just can't think of the word in German!! Then I just say the English word and hope my mum somehow gets what I mean :P

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In grade 9 French, we had to learn expressions like "I'm hungry", which is "J'ai faim", or literally, "I have hunger". Everyone would pronounce the "m" in "faim" and we weren't supposed to, because it sounds like "j'ai femme". Our French teacher got upset and said "OK, guys, for the last time, you do not pronounce the 'm'. You would never go into a restaurant and say (he would yell the next bit)

I HAVE WOMAN!"

And we never did it again.

Edited by Sonneteer_Trombonist
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