Help me get over my vanilla cuntyness

There is no excuse for this faux pas, as I had been living in the UK for some years when I did it.

I was on a night out with some friends of my flatmate, and we ended up on this basement bar which had good live music but slightly out there punters. I went to the toilet, and saw this woman , who was out of her face on somethingk and started punching her reflection on the mirror while shouting at herself.

I got out of there before she noticed me, and must have looked quite shocked because my friend asked me if I was OK. I then told the entire table that I had just seen a woman fisting herself at the mirror.

It took months for my flatmate to let go of that one.

Also I recently wrote to a gp to discuss a referral for a person I misspelled as "son of a pr**k". Needless to say that wasn't their name.

I also once asked a client if they would have trouble 'meeting me in a shower' (instead of shelter). Since I'm a psychologist it wasn't exactly what I mean to say! I'm not very talented in Hebrew.

The first time I asked for a glass of water in Hebrew, I evidently asked for a "c*nt of bowels" - the difference between an o and an oo guys. It took me 20 years to ask for a glass of anything again!

i did something similar i was wired no sleep lots of coffee i went to a coffee shop and i went to order a black coffee and a diet coke but what came out was i would like black coc-fee everyone heard i was so mortified i ran out

These have made me cry with laughter! 😂😄😄😄 brilliant!

Another "not quite as fluent as I thought I was" Spanish balls-up. Having spent a year teaching English in Spain some while back, my accent isn't too bad. But when we visited a few years back, the hotel bathroom had not been properly re-stocked. My request for "sopa" (soup) so that I could wash my face was met with completely blank looks from the evidently rather dim chambermaid. Which made me say it louder, and use face-washing gestures. Still nothing. It was only when I saw the lunch menu later that I realised my error.

I've asked a surprised lady in Madrid where the Playa Mayor is instead of the Plaza Mayor. Obviously, the nearest beach is hundreds of miles away.

It's a great experience to live abroad and learn another language, it's so humbling because you're guaranteed to make a colossal arse of yourself many times. My pet anecdotal theory is that women cope with this aspect better than men as their egos are less fragile...bit like the way men don't like asking for directions

We took over a pub a couple of years ago and it was in a right state. There had been a mouse infestation and the previous people had left the place filthy, set fire to a mattress in the flat above and other gross stuff.

We cleaned it all up, chucked out all the crap furniture and I had shampooed all the carpets upstairs. I then lit some incense to make it smell a bit more pleasant before going down into the bar to chat to customers.

5 minutes later my 15yo daughter came downstairs and announced to a packed bar that the flat stank of incest.

A fair few pints were spat out!

I don't believe this post at all.

In my German oral I said I travelled to Germany by river , meaning to say airplane. He asked me again and I said yes I swam it haha

Another email one.. I have typed both 'manly thanks' and 'man thanks' in emails at work!

I've nothing to add but just wanted to say thanks to OP and PPs for a fantastic thread, trying to contain laughter so as not to wake up household

sleeping always the added hilarity of having a cold and rubbing some Vicks into your chest.

In German the words for joke and wank sound incredibly similar.

So similar that when I said one day in a me job "Brits think the Germans have no sense of humour and don't know what a good joke is" I really wasn't expecting the stony horrified silence I received.

Witz was what I should have said. Wichs was what came out.....

In a Chinese restaurant my husband asked for crispy dick instead of crispy duck!

I am learning Korean, so far no huge mishaps (maybe because there are so many homophones that it's not even funny to misuse a word - eg sperm and pagoda are both jeongja; jaji malayo could mean 'don't go to sleep' or 'roll my dick up'), more mistakes with using the wrong formality and respect level or whatever which is cringe but not a terribly funny story.

My Korean husband though - he's very good at English but he does get mixed up. We have been watching the Tudors on Netflix and he got really into it and kept calling me 'your highness' and 'your majesty' and stuff. He thought that 'lord' was spelled 'load' so he kept texting 'I AM YOUR LOAD!' at me. When I explained that load meant jizz, he got quite sad and said 'every word in English means dick or pussy or jizz.' He also laughed because I had a student called 'jack' - 'JACK? LIKE JACK OFF? HA ha ha, those parents are so stupid!' When I told him it was a totally normal name, he was annoyed.

This has made me lol so much!

My only linguistic mistakes have been in English embarrassingly enough! I once asked via email if a manager could let me know about his teams 'shits' instead of 'shifts' when organising some training. Cringe 🤐

At school a friend and I struggled to remember the word 'parallelogram' in a test. I left the answer blank. My friend went with 'rectum' much to the teachers and our classes delight. I still chuckle at this memory!

The story about telling someone that derriere meant de rien reminds me of what an ex did to me once.

He was Croatian, and told me the Croatian for hug me and kiss me. A few years later, having split up with him, I was having dinner with a group of friends, 3 of whom were Bosnians, and there was much banter going on in both languages. One of the Bosnians said something cheeky to which the other replied with the phrase I had been told meant "kiss me", but very much in a tone of voice which suggested it didn't mean that at all (the phrase was delivered very much in the tone of voice which suggested it meant something along the lines of "yeah, and you can kiss my ass too!")

So I asked what "puzi me" and "mozi me" meant (apologies, that's roughly phonetic as I was introduced to them, I have no idea how you actually spell either).

Five minutes later after my Bosnian friends had finished rolling around the floor laughing, they told me he had in fact told me how to say "suck my dick" and "jerk me off".

(To this day I still wonder why he taught me to say these things in the first person...)

I asked for a poonani instead of a panini!!

My lovely Polish friend told her in-laws that she loved their son so much as he filled her every hole. Clearly meant he makes her feel whole.... but knowing her

An Ex-BF who lived in Japan had a sick sense of humour. His in-laws cat had kittens. One had a tail that constantly pointed upwards and one was blind with withered eyes. He named them "Anus" and "Raisin" and they thought they had lovely English names

Once on a guided hike in France, the French guide was trying to explain by showing on the map that the group could split later if people wanted, with the choice of a more difficult or an easier route.

The French verb "senter" can mean either "to feel" or "to smell".

Consequently, in his outrageous French accent, he was saying, " and if you smell good, you can take zis way, and if you smell bad you can take zat way"

Feel for you. I often used to mistype my own name in emails as was doing so fast...we also have a book at work where we write down all the ridiculous things we all say from time to time...it's quite cathartic