(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!

DH obviously said Clit - hero

But then he thought Blackpool would be like Old Orchard Beach so what can you expect?

Oh, Swiss German - where making the “u” in Butter fractionally too short apparently renders the word incomprehensible & earns you a glare followed by the bellowed eye-rolly correction “du meinst BUTTER!” (I was in my 20s, incidentally: rude ) & then actually answering my question about allergens. Funtimes.

I also greatly enjoyed having a woman who couldn’t actually speak more than a few words of English do the shouty-miming thing at me when the train we were on broke down. Because everyone knows English people don’t speak other languages. This was after I’d gone through what the announcement about the breakdown had said; explained where I’d been & where I was going to; & clarified that yes, I’d really only studied German at school. Maybe she was just big into mime &/or interpretive dance? She was quite certain I’d not manage to find my bus without her assistance, not sure how she thought I’d been managing prior to her advent - she was awfully excited about getting to use one of her English phrases (to wit, “follow me!”) bless her.

Someone in my German A-Level class once translated “Ich komme aus Dunnwald” as “I come out of the thin forest” which I think will amuse me until my dying day. And someone else confused “Anfall” & “Unfall”, which isn’t really what you want in context of terrorism. Mind you, one of my French teachers thought she could get away with using franglais & genuinely referred to “les eejacairs*” rather than “les pirats de l’air”.

One of my sister’s friends had rather a reputation for dropping clangers in German - she confidently asserted that she & her own sister didn’t knit themselves very often (wasn’t often they argued either) & she kept referring - quite insistently - to my sister’s hobby of horse holidays & all the looming she did (well, to be fair abzeichnen has various meanings & obviously it wasn’t declined, so it was effectively nonsense but I love the idea of Girlguiding members going looming about rather than getting badges... in fact, my Guides do rather loom: accurate error was accurate...)

*please imagine ’Allo, ‘Allo type-accent

They knew fine what you were saying @MarieVanGoethen. Passive aggression is a Swiss art form. See also the aggressive gruezi - you wouldn't think you could do an aggressive gruezi, but one time I was out in our village with the kids in the buggy and it started pissing it down with rain and I was getting the buggy cover on, which involved securing a strap right underneath the buggy, and I was hunkered down trying not to kneel on the ground, with my head under the buggy and some prick passed me and went
"gruezi"
stops
clears his throat
"GRUEZI"

I was like "gruezi, fuck off now" which he pretended not to understand...

Oh contessa yes! "focus" is a blinder. I explained to my Italian friend that "fuck-yuss" might give people the wrong idea, and told her to say "folk-us" which she of course then said with the L in "folk", necessitating another correction, to which she replied "fuck-us your English"

Mention of focus reminds me of this