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If you've ever interacted with someone who speaks a different language, what is the funniest misunderstanding you've had? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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An example of what I mean:

I, in China, told an English speaking Chinese friend I needed to stop off in the bathroom to "take a shit."

He looked appalled and after I asked why he had that look, he asked what I was going to do with someone's shit.

I had not laughed so hard in a while, and it totally makes sense.

I explained it was an expression for pooping, and he comes back with, "wouldn't that be giving a shit?"

I then got to explain that to give a shit means you care and I realized how fucked some of our expressions are.

What misunderstandings made you laugh?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

This happens within English too.. I'm a climate scientist, and I was working in consulting talking to some financial risk people. They were asking us for a "conservative" risk figures. In climate science that would naturally mean a low warming projection. For them it meant being conservative in their appetite for risk, so actually more like a worst-case example. That one took a couple of heated meetings to figure out.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

And here I initially thought politics when I heard climate change and conservative in the same sentence. As in, "Climate change is not seen as a risk to conservatives."

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

“Conservatives believe it’s caused by earth’s natural processes, therefore in order to explain the results we’re seeing please consult vulcanologists and geologists because apparently it’s multiple apocalyptic events not just the one”