(Lighthearted) To wish that native language speakers could realise that when foreigners (me) say impolite things it's usually a mistake and not a deliberate slight?

[toomuchtooold]

Lighthearted, don't flame me, but god I find this exhausting. I live in Germany, people are very friendly, but I get some serious side eye at times for mistakes I make in the language. A couple of times I've been searching for the informal dative plural pronoun (euch) and come up with the formal one instead (Ihnen) and seen my school run mum colleagues give me a hard stare.
There's also the thing where someone says something and I don't know the word and I repeat it with a questioning tone and get some massive justifying explanation for why it all went down that way and I'm like no, I wasn't questioning your version of events, I just don't know what that word means?

AIBU to expect people to remember that foreigners make mistakes? My German is nowhere near good enough for them to forget it's not my first language!

A barman in a favourite bar in Corfu has great English but occasionally asks for help. Last time we were there, he told us this story.
A customer told him that to be extra polite to British customers when they came in the bar he should say: "Good evening tossers", rather than just 'hello'.
So poor old Stefanos was saying "Good evening tossers" left right and centre and wondering why he was getting strange looks.
One kind man took him to one side and asked why he was saying this, and then filled him in on what he'd really been saying.

Oh this thread is so much better than the OP, these are excellent!

The only one I've done recently was from my bloody wean who speaks English and German with a similar total lack of respect for both. They just started ballet and she comes out wailing because she can't do a spaghetti. And I'm like a what? And she demonstrates, and it's the splits. And I think no more about it till I'm telling one of the other mums about it and she tells me it's not spaghetti, it's spagat. I told DD2 and she was like yeah spagat spaghetti same difference. Aargh!

About the don't care/don't give a shit thing, I remember very early on in my relationship with Swiss German speaking DH, explaining to him that "I don't care" is a bit stronger than "es ist egal" in German and that the phrase he was looking for was "I don't mind". Now I've been married to the cheeky bugger for 17 years I realise that "I don't care" was probably exactly right. Not a man to mince his words... ever...

It's not just foreign languages, trying to speak English in the US can be bad enough. I've been stared at incomprehendingly for asking for "water" rather than "wahder" in North Carolina and been served sake instead of coke in California.

Doing our mock French 'o' level, we had to translate a piece about a man who parked his car on a pente légère (a slight slope).
When we got the results of the mocks back, the teacher said that one creative person had translated it as the man had parked his car and had a pint of lager.

The other howler (same test, same person) saw "les peupliers minces frissonné dans le vent" (the slim poplar trees shivered in the wind) translated as:
"The people were frying mince in the night".
And no, it wasn't me, it was my best friend.

I think they're very unkind. But then I once asked for a testicle instead of a spoon in a restaurant in France.

I recently wrote to someone I know in Bavaria asking about their problems with the snow. She wrote back in German (she thinks I speak better German than I do!) that soldiers had been on the roof for 3 days. I thought this was some sort of colloquialism Id never heard of before, such as "the cat's out of the bag" because it sounded so bizarre but on looking on their local news site I realised she had meant it literally - they were shovelling snow off the roof. very serious for her and her neighbours of course but Im still giggling

I listen to a lot of podcasts and one of my greatest joys in life is hearing an American trying to pronounce Worcester.

Very tenuous excuse for a great joke:

Did you know that a lot of Charles Dickens' writings were serialised in two local newspapers before they were published as actual books?

It was the Bicester Times, it was the Worcester Times

This is a brilliant thread. Love the Worcester joke !

I am married into Polish relations and have a tenous grasp on the language, which I manage to translate into the joke that I speak/understand 5 % and you don't know which 5 (so watch out). Polish people must be very similar to Germans. I often struggle with prepositions and cases (often = allthebloodytime). So I'll say "I put it ...on... ? in....? the table?" with a massive upward inflection and quizzical look to say that here's an aspect of the language I'm not sure of, help me out, which is it, in or on? And the Poles just look at you, waiting. Maybe if they look at you long enough you'll just suddenly remember all that latent grammar or what. So annoying. If they just filled me in all the time I'd communicate more and learn more. Too literal by far.

Oh yes pixie - Ahoghill. Not too far from my mother's family. It sounds like a sneeze.

I totally have this. I have a degree in Russian. I just moved to a country with another Slavic language. I spent what felt like hours yesterday, with severe toothache, asking for clove oil in pharmacies.

Me: Do you have any clove oil, please?
Assistant: Sorry?
Me, with increasing desperation: Clove oil. Clove oil? Clove oil? CLOVE OIL?
Assistant: looks blank
Me: whips out phone, looks up clove oil
Assistant: Oh, CLOVE OIL. No.

But I've been a Scot in England for a lot of my adult life, so I'm used to it …

Non-native speakers of English often sound rude because they translate literally from their native language, which retains the tu/vous politeness distinction

Isn't English virtually the only language that doesn't use honorific grammar to denote status? Our way of doing things seems so much more complicated, I'm not surprised so many ESL speakers struggle with it.

I was brought up being taught that it was rude (and incorrect) to say "Can I have..." rather than "May I" or "Could I". I realise that this is no longer the case, but I still wince inwardly when I hear it.

Isn't English virtually the only language that doesn't use honorific grammar to denote status? Our way of doing things seems so much more complicated, I'm not surprised so many ESL speakers struggle with it.

For me, it's partly that my first language doesn't really have a word for "please", for example. There is a way to make your request polite, but it's a little affix, so if you're translating in your head, it's easy to absentmindedly forget that extra "please" word, I guess. I've been in the UK for ages now, and am used to all the extra pleases and thankyous and no thankyous, and if-it's-not-too-much-trouble-would-it-maybe-possibly-be-possible-if's, so that I've been told I being weird and overly formal in my own language now...

I pretty much gave up on Cantonese when I discovered that the difference between saying "nine", "help" and "penis" was just context and inflection. Same word.

Oh dear. That could lead to some awkward misunderstandings when asking for assistance. Imagine going up to some bloke in the street and explaining that you urgently needed some cock?

Me and the dc have taken the piss out of him often enough now that he knows saying “you are wrong” or “you have failed” is no time generally acceptable here.

Yet in most circles, it would not be considered rude to say "Oh dear, you messed that up". It's no wonder that people struggle with learning English, it's complicated and many of "the rules" are unwritten.

As a Welsh speaker i've heard lots of funny attempts at the language with varying degrees of humour and much respect for the fact they are learning the language.

Sashkin - what I find particularly entertaining about Germans is when they correct native English speakers use of English. I used to work in a university where European students came on exchange. An English student was showing the Germans around and said something like "He done well". One of the Germans said "I think you mean "He DID well"." I had to intervene to stop the English lad from decking the German.

I speak German with a Swiss accent, so when I am in Germany, the natives have no idea that I am English but I just get patronised for being Swiss!

DH's brother is married to a French woman. The kids speak English and French. MIL (native English speaker) declared that it would be great that all BIL's kids would grow up and be bisexual.

She meant bilingual.

Once tried to ask for stamps in Louisiana. They just couldn't seem to get my accent for "stamps". So said "stamps in an American accent and they were like oh! Stamps!

My brother lives in Thailand teaching English and is really struggling with Thai. It's a tonal language (like Chinese) and the tone is so integral to the word's meaning that if you get it wrong, the listener can't work out what you meant to say.

To take a Chinese example, the word ma can mean 'mother', 'hemp', 'horse' or 'scold' depending on the tone with which it's pronounced. If you get the tone wrong, it's just as incomprehensible as if someone said in English "I rode my mother last night" - you'd have no way of figuring out that the person actually meant horse!

Bro has pretty much given up on Thai...

ErrolTheDragon - perhaps we should write a book on American pronunciation of English place names? My particular favourites
Lie-ces-ter Square and Egdgy-waa-re. I used to live in Norfolk and Wymondham, Happisburgh, Hautbois were beyond most visitors from outside the county - particularly the last one which is a very small place.

Very true about English having parallel German/Norse and French/Latin words. A French colleague couldn't remember the word 'improve' and instead said 'ameliorer' and was staggered to realise that the meeting understood it as ameliorate. No problem.

On holiday overseas with friends, in a restaurant.

Friend wanted to order chicken but was struggling with translating the menu. She stood up and flapped her arms, saying 'Cock, cock' to a round of applause and laughter.

I pretended not to be with her but it was more fun than a previous holiday where she said she spoke German but every meal she ordered (for both of us as I had no clue) was either tuna or pizza, for a whole week.

"Significantly shit" is amazing.

Tbf even in Cornwall the English will get looks and eye rolls for the mispronunciations. My dad is terrible for it, despite my mum being raised there. I cringe myself inside out when he's saying "Lornseston" or "Penteewaan".

Great thread! On a department store escalator in the West Midlands a man asked me which floor it was for for 'ties'. I pointed down to Ist floor, Menswear. The exasperated response was 'No, CHILDREN'S ties!'
I got it, 6th floor, Toys!

In rural Shropshire a lorry driver was trying to find Huggie's Farm. After a think it dawned on me that he was looking for the farm I was staying at owned by Mr Hughes.