most embarrassing moment while learning Chinese

[joecurran]

I found out the hard way that you have to be careful when saying "pen" in chinese

[Demonic_Duck]

When I first tried to transliterate my second name, I got the result 肉, which means "meat" and caused a disproportionate amount of mirth when I showed it to my Taiwanese friend. I'm still not entirely sure why that was so hilarious to her, but there you go

[heifeng]

on the subject of 肉。。。。

for some reason...I have no clue why, whenever the chengyu 酒肉朋友 comes to mind my first instinct is to to say 狗肉朋友。same thing for 公共场所。 I really want to say 公共厕所 instead for some reason. I remember saying both of these things in class long ago when my brain was functioning slower than my mouth....hahahahha. Comic relief for the day. Not necessarily super embarassing though, I'm sure I've gotten myself into more embarassing language situations~

[tooironic]

I have had too many embarrassing moments of learning this language to count - and, by the way, this is a good thing, since failure is such an important part of the learning process - but I just thought I'd share a funny thing that happened to me a few weeks ago.

As part of my job I work as an assistant teacher for a Chinese interpreting training course here in Melbourne. We were talking about medical terms in Chinese and I had to write up the characters for 白喉 (diphtheria). So I start writing 白, an easy character of course. And what do I manage to follow this with? No, not 喉... but 痴.

Brain fail.

[Glenn]

Does that mean that some idiot asked you to do it, or some idiot went and got diphtheria?

[Lu]

.I have no clue why, whenever the chengyu 酒肉朋友 comes to mind my first instinct is to to say 狗肉朋友。same thing for 公共场所。 I really want to say 公共厕所 instead for some reason.

I think there's something Freudian at work in such cases. For years I've known I should never say 安全套 when meaning 安全帽 or 安全带, yet not so long ago I was in a car and said something to the driver about the seatbelt and of course I managed to say 安全套 instead of 安全带. It doesn't even sound alike!

[edelweis]

@Lu

You should put a warning on that post or something. Now that I've looked up the embarrassing word I'm sure to get nervous around seatbelts and hard hats, increasing the probability of a slip up... need an obliviate or something.

[xuefang]

I'm almost too embarrased to share this. My most embarrasing moment was a week ago when my teacher told me that 已 and 己 are too different characters. For three years I had though that it's one character with two readings!

[msdustrain]

When my family first came to China someone gave my sister the Chinese name, "他妈的." Whenever someone asked her name she'd proudly answer, "F**k you."

Someone tried somthing like that with me too, telling me to have the Chinese name, "一朵花." Which as it turned out to mean something like, "virgin" (?? I forgot what it meant exactly, does anyone know?)

==========

"一朵花" means "one flower", it is usually used to discribe girls, meaning some one is as beautiful as a flower.

[Ludens]

I once, not all that long ago, wrote and e-mail to my previous teacher starting with “亲爱的”.

[msdustrain]

Ludens

If you wrote "亲爱的老师", then it's very good. But "亲爱的" is not...

[muirm]

My most embarrassing moment was a cultural faux pas rather than a language mixup. After getting back our 听写 one day in class, I noticed the teacher hadn't caught a few errors with my 繁体字 (I couldn't remember one or two so I wrote simplified instead). While unsurprising since we were in mainland China, that didn't stop me from gloating that I had slipped a few by her. At the time I thought it was a bit of harmless fun, especially since I was probably older than the teacher, and it was a small class, so everyone was pretty chummy. Little did I know (although in retrospect is fairly obvious) that I greatly "de-faced" her that day, and she disliked me for the rest of the course (and all eternity, I presume). To her credit, I did not sense any change in her attitude, and the only reason I know how she felt was because another student told me after the course was over (the teacher had confided in the other student during a 1-on-1).

The more I think about it, the more I realize it would have been pretty rude in any culture, not just Chinese. Oh well, all the more embarrassing!

[Serge Melnyk]

I remember, once, I was talking to someone and wanted to say "let's go": zou3!, but said qu4!-"get out" instead.

[kari]

Mrs. Teresa at the local Asian Market store teaches me Mandarin in exchange that I buy from her shop. She had recently taught me how to say 篮子 (lanzi, basket), so the next time I visited her, I was feeling quite confident when I picked up a basket and said what I thought was 'basket.' She chuckled and said, "No, you said basketball, lanQIU! It's basket, lanZI!"

That really endeared me to her, lol.

[Gleaves]

Last week, I was trying to tell my tutor I was going to make dumplings, so I was aiming for 包饺子。 I forgot to use 包 and instead said 做。 I then also forgot the word for dumpling and somehow came up with biaozi. So what she heard was 做婊子。 Yikes.

[王子轩]

Haha, what a great thread. Nice to know people have said more embarrassing things than me, as well as a few heads up! : P After a few years in China I'm still making some pretty wild mistakes with spoken Chinese, but the most confusing thing I'm aware of that I've ever said to anyone is to a taxi driver a few weeks into learning. My pronunciation was barely comprehensible, terrible vocab, grammar etc. Anyway, my classmate and I had missed the junction to the road that we wanted to turn onto. Between us we managed;

司机，蜻蜓！ （请停...!)

哪里啊？

这里！

哪里？

我要去后天！（后边）

Driver, a dragonfly!

Where?

Here!

Where!?

I want to go to the day after tomorrow!

Luckily we made it to our destination without the driver attempting to break the speed of light, and a friend later clarified why the poor driver didn't understand our simple requests!

[pprendeville]

I was looking up a word recently on Pleco which is slightly naughty and afterwards I just closed the app. I was at an event a few hours later and met a Chinese person and I told him I happened to be studying Chinese and went about demonstrating to him the usefulness of Pleco. I opened it up and the naughty word was what was on screen so suffice to say I felt like a right ejit. Lesson learned to erase any words like that in future.

[muirm]

naughty word

I don't think you can fully exorcise the embarrassment and achieve catharsis without sharing what the word was. At least the category. Body part?

[yialanliu]

This is going to sound weird, but I just learned some slang for saying "period" as in time of the month. "dayima"

And then I said the slang about a girl who was PMSing... I got what I thought was a confused look and explained what the slang was.

Then I got a reply saying "I know what it means, but wow, that's the first time I ever heard of a guy explaining what time of the month was to me."

[irishpolyglot]

My teacher found it terribly amusing when I was trying to say “My first time abroad was in America” and the way I phrased it, made “first time” in general (i.e. traveling) sound like my first time having sex was in America. She suggested I say 我第一次 rather than 我的第一次 in this context to avoid giggles in future!

On the other hand, the conversation took a rather interesting turn from the topic of "travel" to something else...