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 Language Learning Forum : Cultural Experiences in Foreign Languages |  | |
| sammymcgoff Groupie United Kingdom Joined 4158 days ago 40 posts - 43 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish | Message 9 of 14 09 January 2013 at 1:58pm | IP Logged |
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This happened to me the other day. I have a Belgian classmate at university, who is fluent in 4 languages. I was talking to him about the Xmas holidays and I blurted out "Oui" when he was speaking to me (French is one of the languages he speaks fluently and I took a GCSE in the language). His response was "What? Do you speak French?!" That was priceless.
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| Quique Diglot Senior Member Spain cronopios.net/Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4477 days ago 183 posts - 313 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: French, German | Message 10 of 14 09 January 2013 at 9:10pm | IP Logged |
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It has happened to me several times. Denmark is a small country, but you can find Danes anywhere. While they expect foreigners in DK to learn Danish, they don't expect to meet non-Danes abroad who can speak their language. I've surprised Danish people in Guatemala, Italy, Japan...
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| renaissancemedi Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Greece Joined 4153 days ago 941 posts - 1309 votes Speaks: Greek*, Ancient Greek*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 11 of 14 10 January 2013 at 8:49am | IP Logged |
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In Italy, but in reverse. They can't tell we are foreigners by looking at us, me and my husband, so they assume we are Italian.
One day in Venice, we were looking for a particular shop, but we were lost (of course!). So I asked a lady "excuse me, where is ....", at which she replied with the fastest Italian you can imagine. I said "could you repeat that please?", which made her have the most surprised look on her face, and she murmured "...I thought..." Then she smiled and continued slower. She thought I was Italian when I spoke the first time, which made me so happy, plus it made me appreciate all those audio courses that make you repeat the pronunciation. Of course it was a short lived illusion, but I still smile to think about it. Edited by renaissancemedi on 10 January 2013 at 8:53am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Ojorolla Diglot Groupie France Joined 4760 days ago 90 posts - 130 votes Speaks: French*, English | Message 12 of 14 12 January 2013 at 7:27am | IP Logged |
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1) Maybe I have keen ears, but I sometimes hear what people are saying behind my back. When I was a teenager I was living in France and I remember one French girl talking with her girlfriend and saying she thinks I'm a racist(Oh they like this word) because I hardly ever talked to her... Actually it was because my French skill sucked but she didn't know I wasn't Francophone, because on the rare occasions I said something I know I could say, my pronunciation was nearly perfect. On another occasion the very same girl complained to another girl that I made her look retarded because I got 20/20 on a maths test without using a calculator whereas she only got 17/20 relying on one. (I wasn't good at maths at that time, would have been considered below average in my native country but pretty much every kids around here who go to America or Europe are considered maths geniuses over those places...) Well, some people really don't know how to adjust the volume of their voice.
2) One of my cousins, who had been living in America for a couple of years liked to swear at our grandma in English, thinking she wouldn't understand. I understood almost all of what he was saying, but didn't tell him to stop on the spot because If I had, our grandma would have been hurt. Instead I scolded him very heavily on another occasion with something else. I remember how my other cousins didn't want to play with him and excluded him when they wanted to play a game together... *sigh* His school grades weren't bad but he dropped out of high school because of issues with his friends and teachers (he had LOTS of trouble getting along with them). His father, or my uncle is a super rich doctor who owns a hospital in his city, but it coudln't be helped. He never went to university and I still don't know what he's doing these days because I can't ask my aunt about it. Like father, like son - I always feel this saying is true whenever I think about my cousins and their parents... End of ranting. Edited by Ojorolla on 12 January 2013 at 7:28am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4164 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 13 of 14 15 January 2013 at 4:58am | IP Logged |
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Once when I was working in retail, a German family started looking at these t-shirts with American flags on them (my store would do this around Memorial Day and 4th of July). I don't exactly know what could have started this conversation, but one person started a rant in German about how he hated America and he didn't understand why there were t-shirts with the flag on them. My spoken German was fairly rough at the time, but I just simply went up to the family and asked in German if I could help them with anything. That stopped the rant pretty quickly! I more said it because I wanted to see the reaction than because I was actually offended.
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| Earle Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6110 days ago 276 posts - 276 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Norwegian, Spanish | Message 14 of 14 29 January 2013 at 7:20am | IP Logged |
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The funniest incident of this sort happened to me back some years ago in Austria, Sölden, in the Ötztal. (Went within 100' of the Iceman, but he was under at least 20' of snow.) My wife and I and two daughters were staying in a small pension, named "Haus Heel" and had been there for five days. In the little breakfast room, at an adjacent table was an interesting group. There were four older ladies, on vacation, and a man around his mid-30s, in bad health and in the mountains in hope of relief. Each morning, after discussing his health, and other miscellany, they turned to discussing us and Americans in general - not favorably. On our last morning, the same pattern was followed and one of them remarked, of me, "Was glauben Sie, versteht er deutsch?" The man replied with "Er? Kein Wort!" As if on cue, Frau Heel burst into the room, asking me if we'd enjoyed breakfast (she'd gone a bit overboard, it's being our last day). By that time, I was used to the Tiroler accent (Hat's gesmeckt?) and could imitate it to some degree, so I told her yes, and how much we'd enjoyed our stay. All the time, I was watching, from the corner of my eye, the table next to us while they searched their memories for just what exactly they'd said about us for the last several days...
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