Tu oui hud cbayg?
Welcome to another edition of Blogging During Lectures. My name is Host, and I'll be your Twilight for this evening.
In tonight's episode, we'll be discussing foreign languages, one of the (admittedly many) things that I am utterly obsessed with. In particular, we'll be focussing on certain words or phrases that can trip English speakers of foreign languages up, and we'll also be looking at how long I can keep up this TV show host persona.
Many languages have borrowed words from English (and vice versa, in fact), but sometimes the words' meanings have changed. French, in particular, is famous (or should that be infamous?) for its "faux amis" or "false friends" - words that look like similar words in English, but often mean something different. Here are just a few examples that might trip a beginner speaker of French up - be on the lookout for them!
Une veste = a jacket
Un blouson = a leather jacket
Une librairie = a bookshop
Un biscuit = a sponge cake. This is one a LOT of people get wrong. The French for a biscuit in the English sense is "un biscuit sec".
Attendre = to wait (for)
Blesser = to wound
Assister à = to attend
Un four = an oven/kiln
Lecture = reading (as a noun)
Conférence = a lecture
Congrès = a conference
A few other partial examples:
"Jolie" looks like "jolly" but it means "pretty".
"Sympa" is short for "sympathique", which looks like it means "sympathetic", but it actually just means "nice" (as in a nice person).
"Agréable" means "pleasant".
"Raisonnable" sounds like "reasonable", but it means "sensible". And "sensible" in French means "sensitive".
"Embrasser" looks like "embrace" but it means "to kiss".
"Personne" means "nobody".
"Queue" in French means "tail", and is also a slang word for the buttocks. The letter Q in French also sounds like this word, which is a source of amusement to French children.
Inversely, "phoque" - which sounds like something very rude in English - means "seal" (as in the marine mammal) in French. Hence the expression "pardon my French".
"Faire" is a verb meaning to do or to make.
"Jeter" means "to throw", not "to jet".
There are also some pairs of words that sound similar in French but mean entirely different things. For example:
Baisser means to lower, baiser used to mean to kiss but nowadays means something a bit more than that, if you know what I mean.
Poisson is fish, poison is... well, what it looks like. Be careful when ordering fish at a restaurant.
When asking someone to repeat what they said, the correct French is "Répétez, s'il vous plaît" (or "Répète, s'il te plaît" if you're talking to a friend). If you say it without pronouncing the first accent, you're essentially saying "Fart again, please" ("péter" means "to fart", and adding "re" to the start of verbs means "do the verb again").
Une pêche is a peach. Un péché is a sin. Pêcher means to fish.
Other common mistakes made in French:
The word for "hot" in French is "chaud". The phrase "I am (feeling) hot" in French is "J'ai chaud". "Je suis chaud" means "I'm horny".
Similarly, to say you're full (i.e. you've eaten a lot) in French, you say "J'ai plein" or "J'ai pleine" if you're a girl. If you say "je suis pleine", it means you're pregnant.
Also similarly, "J'ai fini" means "I have finished". "Je suis fini" means "I am dead".
If your name happens to be Sue, be careful when introducing yourself. It's "Je m'appelle Sue". Saying "Je suis Sue" sounds like you're saying "Je suis saoule", which means "I am drunk".
In French, "un(e) ami" is a friend, and "petit(e)" means "small". However, be careful. If you want to say "my small friend", say "Mon ami petit(e)" (it is always "mon ami", even if your friend is a girl, since "ami" starts with a vowel). If you say "mon petit ami" or "ma petite ami", it means "my boyfriend/girlfriend".
"Savoir" and "connaitre" both mean "to know" in French, but if you want to say "I know that person", say "Je connais cet homme" or "cette femme", not "Je sais cet homme". The latter means you know them in the Biblical sense, basically. "Savoir" is really used to say to know how to do something.
The French for a carpet or rug is "tapis". Make sure you don't pronounce the s at the end, because otherwise you're saying "ta pisse", which means "your urine".
Sometimes, where you put your adjectives can affect the meaning of them. Take the French word "ancien(ne)", for example. If you put it before the noun, it means "ancient". If you put it after the noun, it means "former". So "Mon ancien professeur" means "My ancient teacher", and "Mon professeur ancien" means "My former teacher".
"Visiter" does mean "to visit", but you only use it in the sense of visiting a place or something. If you want to say you visited someone at their house, you use "rendre visite à [whoever]".
German:
Similar to the French example above, the proper way to say "I am (feeling) hot" or "I am warm" in German is "Mir ist heiß" or "Mir ist warm" (literally "To me (it) is hot"). If you say "Ich bin heiß" it means "I am hot" as in "I am attractive/randy", and if you tell a German "Ich bin warm", you've pretty much just told him you're gay. On the other end of the scale, saying "Ich bin kalt" instead of the correct "Mir ist kalt" means "I am a cold-hearted person".
German has a few false friends too: the verb "bekommen" in German is "to get" or "to come by", not "to become" - that would be "werden".
Finnish:
Finnish is a very inflection-based language, and meanings of words can change entirely based on how long you hold a certain letter for. There's also the problem that there's like a metric ton of word endings and different verb forms, which can have rather... unfortunate consequences. Observe.
The Finnish word for "I meet" is "tapaan". Usually, the infinitive form of a verb is formed by taking the "n" off the end of the "I" form in Finnish. However, doing this here gives us "tappaa", which doesn't mean "to meet" but "to kill". Thus, beginner Finnish speakers tend to say something like "Hauska tappaa vanha tuttu" meaning "Nice to kill an old acquaintance". The actual infinitive form of the verb "to meet" in Finnish is "tavata".
Another problem wrong word endings can cause. The verb "naida" can mean different things depending on the context. "Nain eilen Annan" means "I married Anna yesterday". "Nain eilen Annaa" means "I f**ked Anna yesterday".
"Pestä kädet vedellä" means "to wash (one's) hands with water". "Pestä käret verellä", as some dialects pronounce it, means "to wash with blood".
Spanish:
"Embarazada" looks a lot like "embarrassed" but it actually means "pregnant". One non-Spanish pen-making company advertising in Spain told potential customers that its pens wouldn't leak in your pocket and impregnate you. On the other hand, the Spanish word "pregunta", which looks sort of like "pregnant", means "question".
Also in Spanish, changing a noun from masculine to feminine changes the meaning. One famous story tells of a man who tried to sell T-shirts saying "I saw the Pope" when said Pope came to Miami. However, instead of saying "el Papa" meaning "the Pope", the T-shirts said "la Papa", which meant the shirts said "I saw the potato". Similarly, "la cura" means "the cure" and "el cura" means "the priest".
Another thing to watch out for is pronunciation. "MaMA" with the stress on the second syllable means "mother". "MAma" with the stress on the first syllable means "breast".
In Spanish, to say "I am fifteen years old" is "Yo tengo quince años". If you say "Yo tengo quince anos", it means "I have fifteen anuses".
"Carpeta" means a folder - the word for "carpet" is "alfombra".
"Realizar", while it looks like "realise", actually means to create or to do something depending on the context.
"Good" in Spanish is either "bien" or "bueno" depending on context for male subjects. Saying "Estoy bien" to mean "I'm good" (in response to a "How are you?" type question) in Spanish if you're a guy is fine, but saying "Estoy bueno" means "I'm hot/sexy".
Japanese:
Be VERY careful with your pronunciation in a Japanese restaurant. "Kanjo kudasai" means "I would like the bill (or check if you're American), please". "Kancho kudasai" means "I would like an enema, please".
In Japanese, you can say something or someone looks or seems something by changing the last "i" of the adjective (of the adjectives that end in "i", often called verbal adjectives) to "sou". Atarashii (new) becomes atarashisou (looks new). Be careful, however. "Kawaii" means "cute", but "kawaisou" means "pitiful" or "pathetic".
Also, don't get "kawaii" (cute) mixed up with "kowai" (scary).
"Beer" in Japanese is biiru. Biru means building. Keep that in mind if you're in a bar in Japan.
"Kusa" means "grass". "Kuso" means "crap" (literally "excrement").
Russian:
If you're a writer, be careful when telling a Russian what you do. Я писатель means "I am a writer" if you pronounce it "Ya piSATyel". If you say "Ya PIsatyel" it means "I piss". Also, "I write" in Russian is "Я пишу́" (ya piSHOO). If you try and conjugate it as a regular verb, saying "Я писат" (Ya pisat) it means, you guessed it, "I piss".
Also, "в ду́ше" (v DOOshye) means "in the shower". "в душе́" (v dooSHYE) means "in the soul". Be careful not to end up saying "I felt happiness in my shower" or something like that.
Italian:
Careful when ordering pasta. "Penne" means "pens" and is a type of pasta consisting of small narrow tubes (the most common form in the UK). "Pene", however, means "penis". It can also mean "woes" - "pene dell'inferno" means either "hellish woes" or "hell's penis" depending on which article you have before it.
"Romanzo" looks like "romance" but it actually means a novel.
As a bonus, Italian and Spanish are such similar languages that it's difficult to learn both at the same time. One good example is the word "burro". In Italian, it means "butter"; in Spanish, it's "donkey". (This is incidentally where the word "burrito" comes from - the name literally means "little donkey" in Spanish, and originally burritos were made with donkey meat.)
And, as a bonus, how to say "My hovercraft is full of eels" in the above mentioned languages.
French - Mon aéroglisseur est plein d'anguilles.
German - "Mein Luftkissenfahrzeug ist voller Aale" or "Mein Hovercraft ist voller Aale".
Finnish - Ilmatyynyalukseni on täynnä ankeriaita.
Spanish - Mi aerodeslizador está lleno de anguilas.
Japanese - 私のホバークラフトは鰻でいっぱいです (Watashi no hobākurafuto wa unagi de ippai desu).
Russian - Моё судно на воздушной подушке полно угрей (Mayo sudno na vozdushnoy padushkye polna ugryay).
Italian - Il mio hovercraft (or aeroscivolante) è pieno di anguille.
Hungarian (because the original Monty Python sketch was about Hungarian) - A légpárnás hajóm tele van angolnákkal.
That's all we've got time for this week. Tune in next week, when Blogging During Lectures continues!
Good night, everybody!
In tonight's episode, we'll be discussing foreign languages, one of the (admittedly many) things that I am utterly obsessed with. In particular, we'll be focussing on certain words or phrases that can trip English speakers of foreign languages up, and we'll also be looking at how long I can keep up this TV show host persona.
Many languages have borrowed words from English (and vice versa, in fact), but sometimes the words' meanings have changed. French, in particular, is famous (or should that be infamous?) for its "faux amis" or "false friends" - words that look like similar words in English, but often mean something different. Here are just a few examples that might trip a beginner speaker of French up - be on the lookout for them!
Une veste = a jacket
Un blouson = a leather jacket
Une librairie = a bookshop
Un biscuit = a sponge cake. This is one a LOT of people get wrong. The French for a biscuit in the English sense is "un biscuit sec".
Attendre = to wait (for)
Blesser = to wound
Assister à = to attend
Un four = an oven/kiln
Lecture = reading (as a noun)
Conférence = a lecture
Congrès = a conference
A few other partial examples:
"Jolie" looks like "jolly" but it means "pretty".
"Sympa" is short for "sympathique", which looks like it means "sympathetic", but it actually just means "nice" (as in a nice person).
"Agréable" means "pleasant".
"Raisonnable" sounds like "reasonable", but it means "sensible". And "sensible" in French means "sensitive".
"Embrasser" looks like "embrace" but it means "to kiss".
"Personne" means "nobody".
"Queue" in French means "tail", and is also a slang word for the buttocks. The letter Q in French also sounds like this word, which is a source of amusement to French children.
Inversely, "phoque" - which sounds like something very rude in English - means "seal" (as in the marine mammal) in French. Hence the expression "pardon my French".
"Faire" is a verb meaning to do or to make.
"Jeter" means "to throw", not "to jet".
There are also some pairs of words that sound similar in French but mean entirely different things. For example:
Baisser means to lower, baiser used to mean to kiss but nowadays means something a bit more than that, if you know what I mean.
Poisson is fish, poison is... well, what it looks like. Be careful when ordering fish at a restaurant.
When asking someone to repeat what they said, the correct French is "Répétez, s'il vous plaît" (or "Répète, s'il te plaît" if you're talking to a friend). If you say it without pronouncing the first accent, you're essentially saying "Fart again, please" ("péter" means "to fart", and adding "re" to the start of verbs means "do the verb again").
Une pêche is a peach. Un péché is a sin. Pêcher means to fish.
Other common mistakes made in French:
The word for "hot" in French is "chaud". The phrase "I am (feeling) hot" in French is "J'ai chaud". "Je suis chaud" means "I'm horny".
Similarly, to say you're full (i.e. you've eaten a lot) in French, you say "J'ai plein" or "J'ai pleine" if you're a girl. If you say "je suis pleine", it means you're pregnant.
Also similarly, "J'ai fini" means "I have finished". "Je suis fini" means "I am dead".
If your name happens to be Sue, be careful when introducing yourself. It's "Je m'appelle Sue". Saying "Je suis Sue" sounds like you're saying "Je suis saoule", which means "I am drunk".
In French, "un(e) ami" is a friend, and "petit(e)" means "small". However, be careful. If you want to say "my small friend", say "Mon ami petit(e)" (it is always "mon ami", even if your friend is a girl, since "ami" starts with a vowel). If you say "mon petit ami" or "ma petite ami", it means "my boyfriend/girlfriend".
"Savoir" and "connaitre" both mean "to know" in French, but if you want to say "I know that person", say "Je connais cet homme" or "cette femme", not "Je sais cet homme". The latter means you know them in the Biblical sense, basically. "Savoir" is really used to say to know how to do something.
The French for a carpet or rug is "tapis". Make sure you don't pronounce the s at the end, because otherwise you're saying "ta pisse", which means "your urine".
Sometimes, where you put your adjectives can affect the meaning of them. Take the French word "ancien(ne)", for example. If you put it before the noun, it means "ancient". If you put it after the noun, it means "former". So "Mon ancien professeur" means "My ancient teacher", and "Mon professeur ancien" means "My former teacher".
"Visiter" does mean "to visit", but you only use it in the sense of visiting a place or something. If you want to say you visited someone at their house, you use "rendre visite à [whoever]".
German:
Similar to the French example above, the proper way to say "I am (feeling) hot" or "I am warm" in German is "Mir ist heiß" or "Mir ist warm" (literally "To me (it) is hot"). If you say "Ich bin heiß" it means "I am hot" as in "I am attractive/randy", and if you tell a German "Ich bin warm", you've pretty much just told him you're gay. On the other end of the scale, saying "Ich bin kalt" instead of the correct "Mir ist kalt" means "I am a cold-hearted person".
German has a few false friends too: the verb "bekommen" in German is "to get" or "to come by", not "to become" - that would be "werden".
Finnish:
Finnish is a very inflection-based language, and meanings of words can change entirely based on how long you hold a certain letter for. There's also the problem that there's like a metric ton of word endings and different verb forms, which can have rather... unfortunate consequences. Observe.
The Finnish word for "I meet" is "tapaan". Usually, the infinitive form of a verb is formed by taking the "n" off the end of the "I" form in Finnish. However, doing this here gives us "tappaa", which doesn't mean "to meet" but "to kill". Thus, beginner Finnish speakers tend to say something like "Hauska tappaa vanha tuttu" meaning "Nice to kill an old acquaintance". The actual infinitive form of the verb "to meet" in Finnish is "tavata".
Another problem wrong word endings can cause. The verb "naida" can mean different things depending on the context. "Nain eilen Annan" means "I married Anna yesterday". "Nain eilen Annaa" means "I f**ked Anna yesterday".
"Pestä kädet vedellä" means "to wash (one's) hands with water". "Pestä käret verellä", as some dialects pronounce it, means "to wash with blood".
Spanish:
"Embarazada" looks a lot like "embarrassed" but it actually means "pregnant". One non-Spanish pen-making company advertising in Spain told potential customers that its pens wouldn't leak in your pocket and impregnate you. On the other hand, the Spanish word "pregunta", which looks sort of like "pregnant", means "question".
Also in Spanish, changing a noun from masculine to feminine changes the meaning. One famous story tells of a man who tried to sell T-shirts saying "I saw the Pope" when said Pope came to Miami. However, instead of saying "el Papa" meaning "the Pope", the T-shirts said "la Papa", which meant the shirts said "I saw the potato". Similarly, "la cura" means "the cure" and "el cura" means "the priest".
Another thing to watch out for is pronunciation. "MaMA" with the stress on the second syllable means "mother". "MAma" with the stress on the first syllable means "breast".
In Spanish, to say "I am fifteen years old" is "Yo tengo quince años". If you say "Yo tengo quince anos", it means "I have fifteen anuses".
"Carpeta" means a folder - the word for "carpet" is "alfombra".
"Realizar", while it looks like "realise", actually means to create or to do something depending on the context.
"Good" in Spanish is either "bien" or "bueno" depending on context for male subjects. Saying "Estoy bien" to mean "I'm good" (in response to a "How are you?" type question) in Spanish if you're a guy is fine, but saying "Estoy bueno" means "I'm hot/sexy".
Japanese:
Be VERY careful with your pronunciation in a Japanese restaurant. "Kanjo kudasai" means "I would like the bill (or check if you're American), please". "Kancho kudasai" means "I would like an enema, please".
In Japanese, you can say something or someone looks or seems something by changing the last "i" of the adjective (of the adjectives that end in "i", often called verbal adjectives) to "sou". Atarashii (new) becomes atarashisou (looks new). Be careful, however. "Kawaii" means "cute", but "kawaisou" means "pitiful" or "pathetic".
Also, don't get "kawaii" (cute) mixed up with "kowai" (scary).
"Beer" in Japanese is biiru. Biru means building. Keep that in mind if you're in a bar in Japan.
"Kusa" means "grass". "Kuso" means "crap" (literally "excrement").
Russian:
If you're a writer, be careful when telling a Russian what you do. Я писатель means "I am a writer" if you pronounce it "Ya piSATyel". If you say "Ya PIsatyel" it means "I piss". Also, "I write" in Russian is "Я пишу́" (ya piSHOO). If you try and conjugate it as a regular verb, saying "Я писат" (Ya pisat) it means, you guessed it, "I piss".
Also, "в ду́ше" (v DOOshye) means "in the shower". "в душе́" (v dooSHYE) means "in the soul". Be careful not to end up saying "I felt happiness in my shower" or something like that.
Italian:
Careful when ordering pasta. "Penne" means "pens" and is a type of pasta consisting of small narrow tubes (the most common form in the UK). "Pene", however, means "penis". It can also mean "woes" - "pene dell'inferno" means either "hellish woes" or "hell's penis" depending on which article you have before it.
"Romanzo" looks like "romance" but it actually means a novel.
As a bonus, Italian and Spanish are such similar languages that it's difficult to learn both at the same time. One good example is the word "burro". In Italian, it means "butter"; in Spanish, it's "donkey". (This is incidentally where the word "burrito" comes from - the name literally means "little donkey" in Spanish, and originally burritos were made with donkey meat.)
And, as a bonus, how to say "My hovercraft is full of eels" in the above mentioned languages.
French - Mon aéroglisseur est plein d'anguilles.
German - "Mein Luftkissenfahrzeug ist voller Aale" or "Mein Hovercraft ist voller Aale".
Finnish - Ilmatyynyalukseni on täynnä ankeriaita.
Spanish - Mi aerodeslizador está lleno de anguilas.
Japanese - 私のホバークラフトは鰻でいっぱいです (Watashi no hobākurafuto wa unagi de ippai desu).
Russian - Моё судно на воздушной подушке полно угрей (Mayo sudno na vozdushnoy padushkye polna ugryay).
Italian - Il mio hovercraft (or aeroscivolante) è pieno di anguille.
Hungarian (because the original Monty Python sketch was about Hungarian) - A légpárnás hajóm tele van angolnákkal.
That's all we've got time for this week. Tune in next week, when Blogging During Lectures continues!
Good night, everybody!
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