Don't "Try" To Speak Another Language With A Native Speaker

[froglady]

You can also get into trouble if you aren't fluent, but can pronounce a few phrases very well.

I got into trouble once by asking a policeman what was going on (it was a demonstration in a park) and apparently did so well that he assumed I was fluent, so rattled a long, convoluted answer back to me.

DD is fluent in Spanish, and has travelled to Spain (living with a host family) twice. However, she sometimes has difficulty with certain South American "accents." Sort of like the British trying to understand some of our US dialects. Or, trying to understand some of their OWN dialects.

 

[laurie31]

Sorry, but this quote drives me nuts. I forget which American president gave this speech, but German is not structured exactly like English in this respect. My professor would go nuts over grammatical errors, so I do as well. There should be no ein in there at all, the correct way to say it is:

Ich bin Berliner...

I was a German minor in college as well as majoring in Biochemistry. Was two classes short of majoring in it, but I would have had to stick around for another year. Oh well...

It was JFK. I always heard what he literally said was "I am a jelly doughnut" but I don't know if that's true.

Before we got a Spanish translator on staff at the hospital where I work, I tried to ask a mother how many times she had nursed her baby during my shift, using my handy-dandy Spanish phrase book. What I really asked her was "how many breasts do you have"

I got in a bit of trouble with the assumed fluency thing at my 20 year high school reunion. I took German in high school and our exchange student was from Germany. We were pretty good friends. I was excited to see he had come for the reunion and we hugged and I said, "Gruss dich! Wie gehts?" (and I have no clue if I spelled any of that right) but I must have pronounced it okay because he lit up and answered me in a torrent of German that I had no hopes of translating. I had to tell him my German was now very bad. But we still had a good time reminiscing after we both started speaking English

Oh, speaking of exchange students, there was one from Spain who got confused by the words "kitchen" and "chicken." I'd never realized how similar they sounded.

Laurie

 

[Danauk]

When I was at school I studied Spanish and went on a few Spanish exchanges. We had a teacher come with us called Mr Carr. The school we exchanged with called their teachers by their first name. Mr Carrs first name was John, which in Spanish is Juann. So the Spanish kids were calling him Juann Carr (try saying it out loud!) We laughed so much!! (Sorry I know this is a family board!!)

 

[Micca]

When I was growing up my dad and other members of his side of the family would break into some short German conversations. I always figured they were telling dirty jokes. I couldn't wait to learn German when I got to high school, and I would regularly quiz my dad about different German words and phrases. I actually got pretty good at it in a fairly short time, and would engage my dad in short conversations in German. The fun part was I'm sure my mother thought we were telling dirty jokes.