The mistakes you've made

[vec]

Once I was working in a post office in the summer and a Spanish woman came to the register to buy some stamps. Needless to say, it was quite hot, the middle of August, and before I help her I take of my cardigan and say "Estoy tan caliente." Yeah, I said it. God it was horrible. She wasn't even amused. Which surprised me. If a foreigner said to you "I'm so horny" by accident, you'd at least break a laugh, right?

EDIT: This is the 100th reply to this post! Yay for me!

[Ser]

...

[Shm Jay]

Would the correct phrase would be "hago tan calor"?

[vec]

Hago? Tan? No. Tengo tanto calor.

[The Count]

After an intense period of work with my conlang - Summeran I started, not noticing it, to use its SOV word order when speaking Swedish (I had noone to speak Summeran with so I used to go around talking to myself).
Since I at the time (and still does) lived far out in the not-so-very-populated woodland areas I didn't see- and even less talk to anybody for, at least, a month or so. When I finally ended up on a party with old friends an afternoon they all gazed at me and looked like human bird nests. I hadn't noticed that all my sentences were messed up....Summeran style.
/Leo

[The White Crayon]

I can never seem to remember the proper word for a window when I want to; it's either I use the English one on a German exam or the German one when I'm speaking English.

[Ouagadougou]

I always end up pronouncing my Spanish /v/ as /w/, thanks to 7 years of Latin. I also mix vocabulary, like puer rather than chico, and I'm always tempted to add a /t/ to the third person singular form of verbs. And I'm not even proficient, either....

[TomHChappell]

Once I was working in a post office in the summer and a Spanish woman came to the register to buy some stamps. Needless to say, it was quite hot, the middle of August, and before I help her I take of my cardigan and say "Estoy tan caliente." Yeah, I said it. God it was horrible. She wasn't even amused. Which surprised me. If a foreigner said to you "I'm so horny" by accident, you'd at least break a laugh, right?

Sometimes foreigners don't like things like that, worse if you have an English accent. It's like feeling mocked for your language.

But wouldn't vecfaranti's accent have been Icelandic?

[Herr Dunkel]

I can never seem to remember the proper word for a window when I want to; it's either I use the English one on a German exam or the German one when I'm speaking English.

The local language here has five (?) different varieties of "window", each one with its own circumstantial occurence I don't know:

pendžer
prozor
okvir
lafer
otvor

Weh mir oh weh

[Ser]

Once I was working in a post office in the summer and a Spanish woman came to the register to buy some stamps. Needless to say, it was quite hot, the middle of August, and before I help her I take of my cardigan and say "Estoy tan caliente." Yeah, I said it. God it was horrible. She wasn't even amused. Which surprised me. If a foreigner said to you "I'm so horny" by accident, you'd at least break a laugh, right?

Sometimes foreigners don't like things like that, worse if you have an English accent. It's like feeling mocked for your language.

But wouldn't vecfaranti's accent have been Icelandic?

Yeah, although back in March 2009 when I wrote that I didn't know that.

Anyway, now that I think about it, another reason could be that it just happens "caliente" doesn't mean "horny" in the dialect of that Spaniard woman, so vecfaranti's "estoy tan caliente" was just non-sensical. ("Cachondo" is the adjective Spaniards usually use for "horny".)

[Karinta]

Sometimes I mix up Japanese and Tibetan, because I'm okay with Japanese and learning Tibetan, so I'll say things like
Boku wa nagidu desu. or Ngä chichi ga yagshöre, ne?

And Kuro no Mori, I have a similar problem - I put da after -i adjectives sometimes, but usually I just put yo or ne because the feel like copulas subconsciously... An adjective sans a copula isn't something I'm used to yet.

[Drydic]

An on-topic necro! CONGRATULATIONS!

Fyi tho Kuro no Mori's post that you're replying to is from 2008...

[Pressed Bunson]

I was using Spanish with someone on the Internet and used "tomar" to refer to a person. Luckily, the girl I was talking with knew what I meant and told me to use "llevar".

[Ser]

Back in my first months of high school, I was once walking with some girl I was dating, and out of nowhere I suddenly noticed the sky looked amazing (I hadn't bothered looking up until yet), full of orange and pink and shit. So I blurted out "the sky looks so beautiful"! It was in those days where I was just beginning my IPA enlightenment, and I had no idea "the" (in this instance) was pronounced [D@] and not [De] (with Spanish [e]).

There was a couple walking in front of us, and both turned back to me looking creeped out. The girl I was with just started laughing, and I had no idea what was going on. Then she explained I had said, effectively, "this guy looks so beautiful" rather than "the sky looks so beautiful"...


During that same pair of months, I was volunteering in a ESL class for a primary school teacher. I would review the kids' homework, help with activities, photocopy the tons of sheets she used, do stuff for some 3 hours and a half. The teacher would sometimes sit the kids in a circle, and read some passages from the book taking turns (sometimes her, sometimes a student).

One of those days, she asked me to sit with them, and the cruel woman gave me a passage to read. I had coincidentally read a few days before that "six" had /I/ (and not /i/!), and I tried my best to pronounce it. But it just came out as [seks] (with Spanish [e], again). She clearly heard it as "sex" -- in my peripheral view I saw she raised her head from the book to me, and when I looked at her she was containing her laughter.

[Pogostick Man]

Sometimes I mix up Japanese and Tibetan, because I'm okay with Japanese and learning Tibetan, so I'll say things like
Boku wa nagidu desu. or Ngä chichi ga yagshöre, ne?

And Kuro no Mori, I have a similar problem - I put da after -i adjectives sometimes, but usually I just put yo or ne because the feel like copulas subconsciously... An adjective sans a copula isn't something I'm used to yet.

Similarly, I seem to have a knack for using Arabic function words (and maybe even content words) when I'm trying to speak French.

Je suis allé ilā as-sinamā wa j'ai acheté quelque chose, for example (though perhaps it is worth noting that French cinéma sounds almost identical…).

[Vijay]

Oh, there are so many of these I've made in Malayalam. I like to say that I learned about the vowel length contrast the easy way and the hard way. The easy way was a community college professor of Malayalam (basically) just telling me. The hard way was when some kid tried to get me to read something in a newspaper, and I mispronounced the name of Chief Minister Oommen Chandy [ʊmˈmɛn ˈt͡ʃaːɳɖi] as [ʊmˈmɛn ˈt͡ʃəɳɖi]. It turns out [ˈt͡ʃəɳɖi] in Malayalam means 'garbage', so of course she thought that was funny and told me to read it again. I didn't get what was funny and thought she didn't hear what I said, so I repeated it louder. This went on and on with me repeating it louder and louder until according to my dad, the whole town was laughing.