most embarrassing moment while learning Chinese

[Flickserve]

7 hours ago, Bottlecap said:

When you first start having the confidence to speak in Mandarin and they reply in Mandarin.

The blank spare of confusion never ends

 

This is why I dropped time on speaking practice and proportionately increased time on listening practice. What's the point of speaking if you can't understand..?

[Bottlecap]

^Very true. Both are important though. Listening is one thing. Reacting in a conversation is another. The truth is like I could understand what he was saying. It was the panic of how to reply that froze me in place. It comes down to confidence really and being like hey I didn't hear you slow down. For me, I just acted like I understood him.

[mackie1402]

One of the first big dinners I had with my wife's family for Mid-Autumn festival when I first came to China was pretty tough. They all spoke the local language so I couldn't really understand anything. Every so often they would ask me questions in Mandarin and before I could even figure out what they were saying the topic had moved on. The conversations flew fast!

 

I got 'cheers' every 2 minutes from different members of the family and they insisted I had Baijiu.

 

So eventually the Baijiu was gone, then the whisky, then the wine, and finally we moved onto beer. At this point I felt my Chinese was unstoppable, as you do after a few drinks.

I remembered 3 uncles were telling me they were all brothers '兄弟' earlier that night. I decided to bring it up again and say 'so you 3 are all brothers?'. However I slurred my words and rather than '你们三个是兄弟？', I said '你们三个是东西'.

 

That was followed by a bright red face on my part, and the rest of the family in fits of laughter. You live and you learn! I'm just glad I married into such a great and welcoming family!

[Lu]

2 hours ago, mackie1402 said:

I got 'cheers' every 2 minutes from different members of the family and they insisted I had Baijiu.

I have a hunch that they did this on purpose, both to mess with you a bit and to see what you were really like, as one can't help but show one's true nature when drunk enough. Glad it was a happy evening :-)

[iekkim]

This happened to my sister when she was in Xiamen visiting some of our relatives:

 

Our aunt told her to go down to the guard and have him hold onto her bag (for reasons unknown). My sisters and I have very limited mandarin skills, mine much worst. So as she approached the guard, she tells him, 这个 我 阿姨. The guard just stared at her with a blank face but she was too flustered to realize that she had made a mistake. She actually repeated it to the guard several times as she pointed at the bag saying the sentence over and over again before he realized that she wasn't a local. 

 

Lesson learned: 的 is very important. 

[NinKenDo]

Honestly he most embarrassing part of speaking Mandarin is realising that I overestimated my learning speed based on my current learning speed in other languages. I made a lot of claims and placed a lot of bets that I'm gonna have to find a way to back up quickly.

[baihua]

A Chinese student told me “I knew a teacher who with one of his students 出轨”

 

I thought she said 出柜

[anonymoose]

On 23/03/2017 at 3:20 PM, NinKenDo said:

I made a lot of claims and placed a lot of bets that I'm gonna have to find a way to back up quickly.

 

Just follow Benny Lewis' 3-month course on how to water down your claims.

[snowflake]

我喜欢这个小猪。

It wasn't that bad since a friend was there and immediately explained to the other people that I meant to say  我喜欢这个小组.  Plus the classifier for pig is generally 只.

[Mijin]

I remember asking for a 蛋糕三明治 several times and getting annoyed I wasn't being understood -- the egg sandwich is just there!

 

Also, slightly off-topic but I just wanted to point out that embarrassing moments are great for solidifying terms in your mind -- those are amygdala memories!

 

Dont believe the depictions on TV of a genius learning a language just from flicking through a dictionary in their study. In real life real humans have to interact with people and particularly good and bad experiences are very important for memorization.

[Shenmi Boshi]

This is a story I sometimes tell to my maths classes when we're learning fractions (I'm a primary school teacher).

I was eating lunch in the school canteen. that day, it was hamburgers. Because the children have smaller appetites, the hamburgers had been cut in half, and you could ask for one or two halves.

When it came to my turn, I said: "liang ge ban". The ayi was surprised, but gave me what I asked for - two and a half whole hamburgers.

Later, my Chinese wife told me I should have said "liang ge ban ge" if I had wanted to say "two halves".

[HeSyang]

I had been in Taiwan for only one or two months and wanted to say 我要排骨飯. I had heard my friend order it and I asked him how to say it. He told me to say 我要屁股糞. Obviously the young waitress started giggling and went to tell the other workers.

[jannesan]

once told my girlfriend's mom that something she did was 可笑 instead of 好笑

[Dlezcano]

I was with my mother in Beijing and she wanted to visit 宋庆龄故居, so we decided to go there by taxi. Those times I didn't know enough about Chinese history, and I hadn't reached enough proficiency with the Chinese characters, but anyway I tried to impress her a little by reading the address in her travel guide book aloud for the taxi driver: 宋床龄故居. At first the driver didn't understand, so I repeated it many times till he figured out where we wanted to go, then he started laughing aloud saying "宋床龄……逗死我" and my mother started asking again and again why he was laughing so hard.

[xinoxanu]

Oh, I have many:

• I once won a frantic Ping Pong match against a girl and yelled 我硬了!, instead of 我赢了!, with a rather excited face. Yes, it means what you think it means. My girlfriend was next to me and she couldn't stop laughing, which in all honesty was for the best. Tones are important, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
• Went to a fruit shop in my early stages of learning the language. Pointed at a bucketload of mandarins and simply said 八 while gesturing for a bag. The clerk started filling one bag, then another and I had to yell "stop" when I finally realised that I had asked her for 4-8kg of mandarins instead of 8 pieces of fruit. Ended up buying more than 8 mandarins and went to Wal-Mart from then on afterwards.
• Got cheeky with my knowledge of Sichuanese cuisine and proudly ordered 鱼香肉丝 thinking I could eat fish for once. Surprise, surprise, that is not one of the ingredients included in this dish! I thought they just gave me the wrong stuff but didn't want to argue with the laobar and dropped a random but annoyed 好吃. I still cringe to this day but, hey, manners.
• Many instances when I wanted to ask something and ended up asking something totally unrelated because half-way I lost confidence in my Chinese ability. Didn't get the answer I wanted but played it cool; then I asked someone else when the first person wasn't looking... and the same exact thing happened, so I just left without my answer at all. Admittedly this still happens to this day so I don't think there's a cure.  
• Many times where I've asked my teacher about something, she understands something totally different, compliments me in front of the class for bringing up the topic and I just nod and go with the flow. Tbh, I am only half-ashamed here.

[roddy]

Not sure this counts as it's hardly 'while learning', but I was working on a translation this morning and came across a given name that ended with 告. Odd, don't usually see that. Look the person up, can't find. From context, it's not a foreigner with an odd Chinese name. Oh well, never mind. Keep reading. Next character in the sentence: 诉. 

[Demonic_Duck]

I consider my pronunciation to be my strongest skill in Chinese, and I’m frequently told I have a native-like accent. Even though my grammar, vocabulary, and fluency all leave much to be desired, I've been mistaken for a native speaker on the phone many times simply thanks to my pronunciation.

 

The other day, I pronounced 中国 as Zhóngguō.

[大块头]

Ten years ago in Beijing I met with a young woman my age for our first language exchange. The topic of pets came up, and I attempted to explain to her that I was highly allergic to rabbits: they'd make my face go all red, my parents wouldn't let me have one as a kid because I was so allergic, etc.

 

As I went on though, she progressively looked more and more incredulous and uncomfortable. It turns out I had garbled a key piece of vocabulary: Instead of saying “变态反应” (allergy) I was telling her at length about my strong “变态” (perversion).

[Demonic_Duck]

Hey, at least it would have the desired result. She'd make sure to keep rabbits away from you, just not for the right reason.

[PerpetualChange]

When I was overseas a teacher set me up with a language partner, a female faculty from the Chinese department who was at least 20 years my senior. We met for a few times, the first several sessions were great, after half a dozen or so she took me to a nice restaurant. She kept getting friendlier as time went on, and eventually made some very awkward physical advances. I put the kabash on it, but should have done so sooner, I guess I was just naive and in denial about the kind of signals I was getting.