The mistakes you've made

[Rui]

When I was reading a few sentences in Chinese characters, I pronounced them with their equivalent German words, so "他们是朋友" was read as "Sie sind Freunde."

And this was on my Mandarin midterm...

[Ziz]

Often times I mix my Hebrew and Spanish together, so whenever I say something like "Can I go to the bathroom," it comes out something along the lines of: "Puedo lalekhet* al sherutim**?"


*lalekhet= ללכת
**sherutim= שרותים

[ebilein]

It took me a good, long minute to realize that I had added the French -er to Arbeit, leaving me with Freutsch. Joy.

This is a very nice neologism (I think at least, I've never heard it before) and better than always hearing about Denglisch. *g*

As for mixing languages... same goes for me as for most of the others. It does happen (sometimes it's funny), but I can't remember anything right now. The only thing that would come up is... well.

I'll start ranting.

I was on a school trip in Venice and the museum lady talked to us in German. Once she said "und die Goten von die Kriecher" which was supposed to mean "and the gods of the Greek population", but means "and the goths of the crawlers". It was a lot of fun and became a joke in our class.
But then, during a Latin exam, I really DID write "die Kriecher" for "graeci". Which was kind of embarassing.

End of rant.

[TomHChappell]

When I was reading a few sentences in Chinese characters, I pronounced them with their equivalent German words, so "他们是朋友" was read as "Sie sind Freunde."

And this was on my Mandarin midterm...

My goddaughter has two L1s; English and Mandarin.
As a late pre-schooler she was learning to read in both languages.
When reading Mandarin to an English-speaking relative, she would do what you did.

[Xeon]

I always end up adding German vocabulary and syntax into my Spanish.

e.g. Fui a la Supermarkt, um Milch zu comprar.

etc.

[Cockroach]

I can't think of any entertaining mistakes I've made...

Oh, so now you think your perfect, huh?

[TomHChappell]

I can't think of any entertaining mistakes I've made...

Oh, so now you think your perfect, huh?

(I imagine you(Cockroach)'re joking.) I think Zomp just has an unrealistically low opinion of the entertainment value of his mistakes.

[Furi Tsunori]

I often forget the russian letters and write english ones. That wouldn't be so funny if i was not Russian....

and I had no practice in my French for 2 years so I often add english words in french phrases like "mon computeur" not "mon ordinateur" etc

[Khvaragh]

In my Egyptian Arabic class last semester, we were working on using the word عاوز "want," and we had to write sentences out using it. Now I took MSA Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, and Persian last semester, and for the most part I was able to keep the Arabic and the Persian straight (though I often would use Egyptian vocab in MSA class, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing), but that day I had only three hours of sleep and I zoned a little. I was trying to think how to write "I want to drink the water."
(أنا عاوز أشرب المية) but I couldn't remember the word for water, then I thought I did and wrote أنا عاوز أشرب الاب . Except آب is the Persian word for water. What I wrote was something like "I want to drink the father."
My teacher was a bit confused.

I also (for some reason) confused the verbs أدرس "I study" with أسكن "I live" and wrote on a test "أنا أسكن في الكمبيوتر" which means "I live in(side) the computer."

[fahrradkette]

and I had no practice in my French for 2 years so I often add english words in french phrases like "mon computeur" not "mon ordinateur" etc

Vive la quebecois!

[Kilanie]

In Japanese, I far too often say 'desu' at the end of a sentence when there is already another verb... And then when 'desu' is needed, I say 'ka' instead.
Boku wa Kuro no Mori ka?

[Viktor77]

I have a serious problem with the idea of verb subject in many Swedish sentences.

I would say, "...jag lär mig spela gitarr..." when it was really "...lär jag mig spela gitarr...." Still to this day I cannot figure out why the language does this.

And then there's, besides my horrendous pronunciation of the language itself, my overdramatising of Finnish diphthongs.

I've also mixed Spanish "mi" and Swedish "mig." But only with writing Spanish.

And with Cyrillic, I still can't get over Cyrillic P being English R. Actually, my Cyrillic cursive is ten times better than my English cursive, and my native language is English, which is odd.

[C'eler]

Believe me! I get into trouble with that P/R thing in Greek. A lot.

Lessee...In Spanish, we were supposed to have a simple conversation with the teacher. I couldn't remember how to ask her what her name was, so I said "Lo siento. ¿Como se dice "what's your name" en español?" She told me. And I say "¡Ay dios mio! ¡Estoy estupido! Ugh, ahora soy embarazado..."

I later learned that this meant "Oh my gosh, I'm so stupid! Ugh, now I'm pregnant." Which was really funny, considering that I'm a guy.

One time, I said "tengo huevos azules." Ugh. Now you see why I hate spanish!

And the best of all (although it wasn't really a mistake per se) was when I spent a whole week using pho (Vietnamese-pronounced like fuhh) as a curse word everytime I dropped something. It's this type of rice noodles by the way.

[Corundum]

I have a serious problem with the idea of verb subject in many Swedish sentences.

I would say, "...jag lär mig spela gitarr..." when it was really "...lär jag mig spela gitarr...." Still to this day I cannot figure out why the language does this.

From your example it looks like confusion of SVO and V2 syntax?

[Jashan]

Two things I've noticed frequently recently.

Background: I'm a L1 American English speaker, with 8 years of now-dead French (due to lack of use for the last 10 years), and learning Flemish Dutch for the last 9 months while living in Belgium.


Mistakes:

1) Putting English into Dutch without realizing it. "Ik heb al 40 uren gewerkt, if het niet meer is."

2) Putting Dutch into English, but usually realizing it after the fact. "Yeah, I agree, maar you have to.... er.. dammit. But you have to..."

In these two it's made even more amusing by the fact that I use the accent of whatever the "dominant" language is. "maar" with an American /r/, for example.


3) Flipping French into Dutch word order when attempting to write/speak it: "Aujourd'hui je vais en livre acheter." (also often accompanied by using Dutch instead of French words)

4) Generalizing a rule of "if it comes at the end of a clause, it must be an infinitive" in Dutch. "Als je student zijn..." instead of "Als je student bent...", on analogy of "Je moet student zijn...." and similar.

[Radagast]

An interesting mistake I have caught myself making quite a few times is to have spanish verbs agree with 3rd person plural objects instead of with their person singular subjects. I have done this both with first, second and third person singular subjects.

e.g. "El perro mataron las gallinas" to mean "the dog killed the chickens"
or "las canciones que yo cantan" to mean "the songs that I sing"

It is weird since danish doesn't agree with neither verbs or objects, and I don't know where the influence should come from - that makes me think that there must be a cognitive explanation. Such an explanation might be that plural numbers are somehow more salient. or that I am just stupid.

[qiihoskeh]

e.g. "El perro mataron las gallinas" to mean "the dog killed the chickens"
or "las canciones que yo cantan" to mean "the songs that I sing"

I notice that in both examples your objects are plural. Maybe you're thinking ergatively???

[Radagast]

yeah something like that - split ergativity. where the ergativity is triggered by plurality of object.

[BordonianArchivist]

When I was in China, I was talking to a French woman in Spanish during a Chinese banquet. There were a number of people there. I speak Spanish, English and intermediate Chinese. The French woman spoke English, French and Spanish. and the Chinese speakers spoke Chinese (Mandarin and local dialect), with some also speaking English. When we wanted to speak privately, we'd speak Spanish. However, I'd gotten so used to speaking Chinese that my 2nd language brain kept adding Chinese particles (and some Chinese words) to my Spanish, as in "Has ido al tushuguan aqui ma?"

It was very disturbing to my sense of reality.

[coch]

When speaking English I often mistake /s/ for /z/. This is due to my local dialect which does the same even with respect to Italian pronunciation. Then I have problems with using past simple and present perfect at the right times, switching between using too much of the first and too much of the second in different occasions. This is also because of the Italian spoken in the north, where usually only the present perfect is used for both.

[Miekko]

this wasn't really while learning any language, but once, I've made a rather silly mistake in Finnish by taking the Swedish word and applying Finnish morphology. I blame excessive tiredness at the moment, though.

paljonko kostaa instead of paljonko maksaa.

kostaa means 'avenges', maksaa means 'costs'.
(how much does it avenge vs. how much does it cost)

the fact that I asked this of an immigrant was even funnier.

[imploder]

It is weird since danish doesn't agree with neither verbs or objects, and I don't know where the influence should come from - that makes me think that there must be a cognitive explanation. Such an explanation might be that plural numbers are somehow more salient. or that I am just stupid.

Why? You can just make a mistake. Maybe you wanted to say it in the passive at first and then decided to not and forgot to shift the marking. I don't see any other logic in that.

[dhok]

Ah, jeez.
One time in French class, there was a textbook question I was to anwer out loud: "Est-ce que tu vas inviter les etudiants mexicains?"
And I said: "Non, je ne vais pas les inviter parce que je ne parle pas mexicain."
I meant to say "espagnol", of course, but for some reason "mexicain" came out.

[Ambessalion]

i have a problem knowing when to use has/had....

another i do is i'll tend to intermix my 2 languages like some people do with spanglish....

[Torco]

that I remember I've often instinctively 'englified' many spanish words, to such results as 'estaments' or 'car consesionary', but then again all latinos do xD