Slightly morbid academic one.

My computer science professor (who is from Eastern Europe) was explaining an algorithm that he and another professor (from South America) developed. The algorithm processes a graph by first creating a “frame” around it. Since English was not the first language for either of them, the first word they thought of was karkas (каркас, frame in Russian). English word “carcass” sounds pretty much the same, right? but only later, after the work was submitted, they realized they were creating a dead body around the graph.

Talking to someone from Korea in VRChat and they only knew some English.

Someone said Cancer and they got all excited saying they knew that word, it means leage of legends.

getting a handy in Germany is not what you think it is

About 20 years ago I spent the year after high school in Europe. Went backpacking to Italy with friends, one of whom was absurdly handsome, not all that bright and quite forward.

Well, in Rome we met a group of pretty girls who spoke no English but with sign language and a phrase book we figured they were visiting Rome as part of their high school graduation fun. Got a number and promised to meet them in Naples.

Fast forward, we arrive in the evening in Naples with no plan or place to stay hoping to connect with these girls.

We find a payphone, handsome fella grabs it and starts dialing. And then we hear:

“Uhhhh. Ci? Is… Uhhh. Shit. Is your daughter there? Your daughter? Hot daughter? Phone? Fuck. IS YOUR DAUGHTER THERE? I’m the guy from Rome? FUCK!”

Years ago, when I first moved to America from the UK, I was working in a pretty quiet office that backed on to a field. One day mouse appeared, freaked out a couple of the gals in the office, and then it ran and hid under an office cube.

I investigated to see where it was hiding, but it was pretty dark down there. So I asked if either of the gals had a torch. They both got an expression of wide-eyed horror, which confused me for a few seconds.

Then I realized that torch had a different term in America. So I corrected myself and asked if either of them had a flashlight. And they looked very relieved. They thought I was going to get an old school torch and try to smoke the mouse out or set it on fire, and probably set the whole cube on fire in the process.

Not exactly a misunderstanding but… my dad (a professor here in the U.S.) had a close friend and colleague, a Spaniard, who would go off to an intensive language summer school thing every year to teach American college students whatever esoteric Spanish literature was his specialty and only spoke Spanish the entire time.

Whenever he got back, he would spontaneously start talking to us in Spanish, suddenly realized we didn’t speak Spanish, then restart again in English. It didn’t embarrass him or anything, but it amused me when he did it.

I’ve had a few weird exchanges with my wife, although we both are native french speakers.

Turns out the word we use in Switzerland for prune (the fruit) is only used for the dried version of the same fruit in France. Perfect set up for a strange conversation about baking until we found out.

I can’t think of one off hand, but yours made me lol, thanks 😂

He looked appalled and after I asked why he had that look, he asked what I was going to do with someone’s shit.

This is the shit.

I heard a story about how in world war 2 British and American generals got into an argument about the importance of a certain matter.

The British thought the matter needed to be tabled and the Americans were shocked and thought it must not be tabled.

Took some time for them to realize “tabling” an issue meant the exact opposite in America and UK

Since hearing that story the exact expression came up for me online once and on a work call once with British and American speakers.

No foreign language, but still.

Not my story, but one a friend told me.

Someone had the misconception that there was a huge, huge sector of labor dedicated to working in cemetaries in the USA. Like almost everyone knew at least one person who worked at a cemetary. This misconception arose due to the ubiquity of the term “graveyard shift” regardless of the actual job being performed.

Well to preface this, 6 months ago I moved to Japan to study Japanese.

During a trip to Tokyo I randomly ended up talking to a group of salarymen on the way to the same restaurant at me in akihabara. After a while they asked me if I live in Japan and I answered yes and then proceeded to say 日本にしんでいる instead of 日本に住んでいる, for those who don’t speak Japanese, I accidentally said I am dying in Japan instead of I am living in Japan which is surprisingly close pronounciation wise lol. This was met with loads of laughs

This happens within English too… I’m a climate scientist, and I was working in consulting talking to some financial risk people. They were asking us for a “conservative” risk figures. In climate science that would naturally mean a low warming projection. For them it meant being conservative in their appetite for risk, so actually more like a worst-case example. That one took a couple of heated meetings to figure out.

Our Austrian exchange student told us “My sister wants to be a wet”.

The v sound is hard for German speakers

I had sort of the reverse, working with German-speaking coworkers. I used the term “schpiel” to refer to a long talk I was going to give. This led to a moment of confusion because that’s not what the word means in German. It means “game” or “play” and in the context they thought I meant to imply that I was not taking the speech seriously, or maybe wasn’t going to be completely honest. Almost like a con. That’s probably how the loanword first entered the English language, and its meaning has drifted over time.