Help me get over my vanilla cuntyness

Am doing proper lols at these!

I live in France and am an OK French speaker, but I still make howlers all the time. I have to blank most of them out, or I'd never leave the house for fear of fuckup

One of my neighbour's dogs is a bit of a nuisance and tends to follow me on runs. I took him back to his owner a couple of weeks ago, really fed up as he'd wrecked my run, and feeling absurdly over confident, started to shout at his owner that he had followed me again and he really needed to keep him under control. The owner looked really abashed, and I ran off smugly, happy that I'd told him what's what. It was only when I rounded the corner that I realised I had had a brain fart and used "montrer" instead of "suivre" (no idea why), so instead of telling him his dog was following me again, I'd yelled "He's showing me again! He keeps showing me! You need to stop him!". He hadn't been looking abashed, he'd been looking baffled, and no wonder

My hairdresser and I like to practice on each other, him in English and me in French. He was helpless with laughter at one of our earlier sessions when with my stupid anglophone inflexible mouth told him I make "nice ass nice ass NICE ASS of mistakes in French". Beaucoup/beau cul. It's hard!

And I always, always use "embraser" and never "baiser" because that shit will go wrong.

Whilst holidaying in Cyprus, I wandered down the beach one morning saying 'squid' to everyone instead of 'good morning' - calamari instead of kalimera. In my defence, I was hungover :)

God, this thread has killed me! I'm still laughing at 'Hello whores!' and the thought of the colleagues meeting nervously to discuss it.

"Do you think she meant it?"
"No, no - I'm sure it was just a slip of the tongue."
"Who's going to tell her?"
"Umm..."

On honeymoon in Paris and my new, fluent French speaker husband tried to impress me in a Macdonalds by ordering. They were serving lovely potato wedges at the time so he looked at the board, saw they were called 'potaoes' and thought 'ok, don't know that word but it must be what they call wedges' and ordered. The woman looked at him like he was a complete idiot and said in impeccable English 'you mean the potatoes, yeah?' It was an English-translated menu board and the letter t had fallen off. He still hasn't been allowed to forget that.

Still tittering sporadically at the fields full of cunts this morning!

In France One of my friends meant to say she was looking for the town hall "Mairie" What she actually said was she was looking for a husband "Mari"!
The worst I have managed was to say I had come to research my luggage instead of collect it. And in Spanish that I wasn't going to jump in the pool because of my lentils (contact lenses!)

I was so uncomfortable the week we spent in a French hotel staying in Room 100.
Everytime I was asked for my room number (to charge a drink etc) I was incapable of pronouncing "cent" correctly and apparently it sounded much more like "sein". Which is breast.
I wanted to change rooms after 3 days

😂😂😂 at all of these

Not me (well nobody told me if I did...) but a native-English-speaking manager making an end-of-year speech. They attempted Cantonese. This was the 1990s... The number nine is gau. So is penis but with a marginally perceptible change in inflection. LOTS of Cantonese speakers tittering behind their hands politely at the prospect of a good year of penis penis penis ahead!

I'm never attempting to speak another language again! The worst I've done is ask for coconut when I meant chocolate in France. I did perfect "I'm sorry but I don't understand" for my Spanish GCSE oral so I should be covered if we ever go anywhere Spanish speaking!

Don't feel too bad, OP, I think that in Spanish, coño is rather like the French 'con' which, while not exactly polite, is widely used in everyday speech and is not nearly so bad as it is in English.
An older lady stallholder in a French market gave me the wrong change once and when I pointed it out she apologised and called herself a cunt.
But I have to say I am extremely careful when I order a cono in a Spanish icecream parlour....

Hello Whores I can't got bed yet, still crying at this

My college classmate got conejos (rabbits) confused with cojones (slang for testicles) during our year in Spain. The guy in the market was very chuffed to hear what beautiful balls he had. We'll gloss over the time she asked for a straw (paja - also slang for blowjob) for her drink in a bar one time.
Nancy75 I also embarrassed myself more than once by telling people how pregnant I was until someone kindly explained that 'embarazada' didn't mean what I thought it meant.

But for francophones, there is no difference between bitch and beach, or shit and sheet, either.
As an English teenager in France, I had one English teacher who would always tell us to file our "shit". I tried to correct her once but she told me not to speak back, so I expect she's still telling rooms full of giggling teenagers what to do with their "shit".

I made many mistakes while living in France, including telling my headteacher "merci, beau cul" (thanks, nice ass) instead of "merci beaucoup" (thank you very much) and offering a friend who had come for a sleepover "des préservatifs" (condoms) with her toast!

I had a bit of a surprise when my very proper German cousin commented on Facebook 'Gefuhl Geil' with a picture of him with his partner.
Facebook kindly translated this to 'Feeling Horny' - I nearly spat out my food when I saw it, and had to Google it. Turns out 'geil' has several meanings, but he meant it as 'feeling rich' . He had just got his first paycheck!

And then, when I had just finished A-levels and spent some of the summer volunteering at a museum, I greatly confused a Spanish volunteer when I had a coughing fit and dramatically declared, "I must have TB! I'm going to die!" The effect was rather lost on him, because he couldn't understand why I was suddenly going on about television.

onemumtwocountries I just had a hot flush of 'argh' when I read that.. Back in my early twenties, I was dating a man who was not very nice to me, but I was infatuated with him. A lovely guy I knew at work, S, often invited me to lunch in the local pub, where we'd chat, he'd hold my hand and tell me I deserved better. One fateful day, I decided I was being a total cow by leading S on, so when he emailed to invite me to lunch, I decided I should stop meeting him/messing him around and should cancel. I replied that I was going to have to blow him off. He, taking it the saucy way, was thrilled, and when the whole department had stopped laughing at me, I discovered that phrase had two meanings For what it's worth, S - was right, boyfriend was a cock and I should have gone out with S. Or at least followed through on my accidental offer

The je suis chaud/j'ai chaud thing is also a German problem. I told German boyfriend's cousin, "Ich bin heiß" instead of "mir ist heiß." (Though obviously both senses were true, but I was just commenting in the temperature, not my sexiness.)

Welsh has some confusion for beginners with rhiw (hill), rhew (frost) and rhyw (sex). Rhaw (shovel) isn't that different when your accent is rubbish and you can't fully remember all the vocabulary, either.

Whilst on a Spanish exchange in 6th form I went to school with my pen friend and the class were asked to write a poem about love. I thought I had written a pretty good poem and was very proud when the sadistic teacher asked me to read it out to the class.
Unfortunately my knowledge of reflexive verbs let me down and instead of the subtle point I'd intended to make about different kinds of love for your friends, family and even yourself I had written a poem about masturbation (make love to yourself)!

I am a fluent AND native English speaker. And for some bollocky reason I regularly say something fucking stupid in my own native language. And for that, I have absolutely no excuse at all.
I wouldn't know how to begin to ask for a vanilla cunt in Spanish, or even recognise if I had inadvertently done so.
I'm hoping that has to be a good thing. Anyway, I manage to get over it and so should you.

I also find it hard to properly enunciate "cou" (neck) and "cul" (arse).

Yeah, I surprised the guy at SOS médécin one night, describing where the pain was. But for francophones, there is no difference between bitch and beach, or shit and sheet, either.

I can't read these anymore. I am roaring with laughter and waking the house up

I teach English to Germans and my German is at a weird level where I can speak with what sounds like confidence/fluency in terms of speed etc but I often make really rubbish mistakes DS is constantly trying to explain u/ü to me but I don't get it.

One annoying thing about English is that vowel combinations aren't really set which means that for example ie and ei can both be pronounced completely differently or exactly the same way, and although in German it's always consistent (ei = eye, ie = ee) my brain is just not wired to note the difference between ei and ie spellings and I always mix them, and subsequently the pronunciation up.

This is how I came to announce to a very amused class that I had a stiff father (Steif Vater) instead of a stepfather (Stiefvater)

In a Spanish exchange trip my friend tried to tell our host she was embarrassed about something and ended up telling them she was pregnant. As we were only 16 at the time the woman we were staying with was understandably quite concerned at this turn of events!

My husband told a Spanish ticket collector that his ticket didn't smoke (fuma) rather than didn't work (funciona)