most embarrassing moment while learning Chinese

[大块头]

@Demonic_Duck

She would also presumably want to maintain a healthy personal buffer from the strange foreign bunny fetishist!

 

@PerpetualChange

While I was getting an unforgettable lesson on how to say "allergy", another one of my new language exchange partners happened to see us talking. I had only met with her twice (and always with her friends present), but she did not like seeing me talking to another woman. When I got back to the dorm my Nokia was full of texts like "WHO IS SHE?" and "YOU ARE A BAD MAN".

 

 

[Demonic_Duck]

Maybe this doesn't count as embarrassing because I was alone when it happened, but it was pretty hilarious...

 

> singing along to some lyrics on 魔镜网

> start to sing the line “更多更详尽……”

> 更多更详尽歌词 在 ※ Mojim.com　魔镜歌词网

[StChris]

I can't remember any Chinese ones (although I'm sure there were many), by to this day I'm a little haunted by one mistake I made when learning Thai:

 

I was living in a small town in Thailand. I had hired a room in a house, and downstairs there lived a family with 2 young kids, a boy of around 9 or 10 plus his younger sister. The little girl always called her brother "pee pee" (no sniggering!), so I naturally called him the same. Well, in Thai "pee" means older brother, and his name just so happened to be "pee" too, so the girl was saying "older brother pee". For her that's fine and normal, but for me... I remember her dad (so was around the same age as me) trying to explain something about his son's name to me one night while I was drinking with him and his friends (no doubt trying to explain my mistake), but my Thai wasn't good enough to understand. It wasn't until I had already left that place and had moved to Bangkok that it just randomly clicked one day.

 

I spent around a year in that town, and pretty much every day I (a grown adult) was calling this little boy "Pee哥". They must have thought I was a right idiot!

[Lu]

I split off the Thai discussion to a new topic, please do continue the discussion there, because it is interesting.

[Guest realmayo]

I just misread the name of a European city as some quaint word meaning "solar panel".

Can anyone guess?

Spoiler

日內瓦

 

[alantin]

No Chinese ones yet. At least ones I'm aware of, but I was once having dinner with my wife and some of her business acquaintances and tried to say that she was more afraid of earthquakes than I was. I had some kind of a short circuit in my brain and ended up saying that she was scarier than an earthquake instead. That cracked everybody up!

It was very embarrassing though because the two sentences aren't anything alike and I had already been using Japanese daily for years at that point.

[Bobby Dazzler]

Listening on Chinese is very difficult

[calculatrix]

Not Chinese but Japanese. And no harm done. But nevertheless...
It was many years ago. I was a university student and an old Japanese professor visited our department.
Since I was the only one who could speak a bit japanese I was asked to help him connect his computer to the university network.
It was a very specific pre windows japanese laptop, and after hours of trying and it getting late and us being the last two remaining people in the building I suggested to give it a break and try again tomorow.
The nice elderly gentleman agreed and with really heartbreakingly optimistic smile addded in Japanese "And for sure: tomorrow we will have Seikō".
And that was the point where I, well, panicked a little bit, since I had learned all important words and I knew for sure seikō 性交 means "sex".
Putting on a poker face, some polite but hasty sayonaras and leaving the building was a matter of seconds.
Later at home after consulting the dictionary I found, there's a homonym seikō 成功 which means "success".
And that's what we had the next day.

[ZhuoMing]

This ones both a bit of cultural ignorance as well as a Chinese mistake. When I had only been studying Chinese for a year, I studied abroad at a university for minorities (西南民族大学 in Chengdu). So, when I joined the American football team at the university, the form I had to fill out had a question asking which 民族 I am a part of. I had no idea how to answer this properly for myself, but since it was a spreadsheet, I could see my teammate's responses... 彝族，藏族，维族 etc.

 

Me being a white dude with no idea how to say this in Chinese, and no example to copy from, I wrote in 白族. Only a year later did I find out that 白族 is a real ethnic group, and I am certainly not one of them...

[madizi]

Everything in Hunanese.

[suMMit]

My teacher, who speaks quite quickly, often says "怎么来看。。。“. For the longest time I kept thinking - why does she say "how look number 6"?

 

A couple of days ago I was watching a tv program and a character said "咱们来吃“ (or some other verb,idr). An hour later it hit me: OMG my teacher has been saying 咱们来看 all this time!!

[alantin]

On 2/20/2022 at 6:15 AM, suMMit said:

An hour later it hit me: OMG my teacher has been saying 咱们来看 all this time!!

 

Is she a northerner? I've heard that every now and again, but when I used it with a colleague from Shanghai, she said that they don't usually use it and that it's something northerners use.

[Guest realmayo]

咱们 is indeed mainly a northern thing, I would say.

[suMMit]

On 2/20/2022 at 3:57 PM, alantin said:

Is she a northerner?

She is solidly northern. Lives in 哈尔滨. It's my understanding that 咱们 has a closer feeling than 我们.

[Demonic_Duck]

On 2/20/2022 at 10:02 AM, suMMit said:

It's my understanding that 咱们 has a closer feeling than 我们.

 

It's a little more colloquial and also narrower in meaning. “我们” can be either inclusive or exclusive of the listener, whereas “咱们” is always inclusive.

 

我们都是东北人 (includes the speaker and one or more other people, but probably not the listener)

咱们都是东北人 (includes both the speaker and the listener)

[Publius]

Yes. The inclusive-exclusive distinction is believed to be a borrowing from Tungusic languages and therefore exists only in northern branches of Mandarin. The word entered Standard Mandarin but not everyone is aware of the distinction and that can sometimes lead to confusion. For example, when a classmate from Hubei told me 咱们村如何如何, I was like, do we live in the same village?

[imron]

On 2/20/2022 at 3:15 PM, suMMit said:

An hour later it hit me: OMG my teacher has been saying 咱们来看 all this time!!

咱们 is one of my favorite Chinese words. 

[imron]

On 2/20/2022 at 10:13 PM, Publius said:

, I was like, do we live in the same village?

?

[suMMit]

Not the "most",  just one of many... I was in a 兰州拉面 joint with a friend yesterday, ordered at the counter along with my noodles, I ordered 一瓶北冰洋，the woman replies “两“？I say 一瓶就可以了， she persists "两"? I think its because she thinks my friend must also want one, so I again say "一瓶“. Third time she says “冰的吗“！？ Lol she was saying 凉 not 两 ?. If not from the tone, I should've known from the absence of a measure word.

 

For those unfamiliar with 北冰洋：

[Lu]

On 2/20/2022 at 11:13 AM, Demonic_Duck said:

咱们都是东北人

Obligatory nostalgia.

 

On 4/14/2022 at 10:50 AM, suMMit said:

the woman replies “两“？I say 一瓶就可以了， she persists "两"? I think its because she thinks my friend must also want one, so I again say "一瓶“. Third time she says “冰的吗“！？ Lol she was saying 凉 not 两 ?.

Oh I've done that. I think that's a distinction you can only learn by doing it wrong once.