If you've ever interacted with someone who speaks a different language, what is the funniest misunderstanding you've had?
If you've ever interacted with someone who speaks a different language, what is the funniest misunderstanding you've had?
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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I was once working with a team in India to resolve a database issue. During a particular call, we had to export data several times to create backups. Exporting the DB data is done with "dump" commands and my Indian counterpart would repeatedly tell me that he "took a dump just now".
The taking/giving/reaching out term differences between Indian dialect and American English caused me some confusion on one of my calls. They kept saying they were trying to “take RDP from” server A to server B. I interpreted that as connecting from A to B, since they used the word “from.”
It took a bit, but I eventually realized that there seemed to be to be a fundamental difference in the way these things are thought about.
Americans, we always are reaching toward, pointing to, connecting to, or connecting something from HERE to THERE, like we’re shooting a gun or drawing a line. That is not how these Indian guys were looking at it.
If you are “taking RDP from” server A to server B, then that means you are on server B trying to connect to server A. It’s more like if you were to imagine reaching out with your hand and grabbing something toward you.
This is super interesting and I often wonder how differences in thought patterns, as they relate to a language, affect the culture of the language speakers themselves.
Do those speaking that dialect have like a cultural feeling that they need to "take" or "receive" or otherwise "acquire" a thing (like RDP) to make a connection? This as opposed to what I see as a very american way of looking at things (again using RDP as an example here), where "we've already got it, so will give it to you to make the connection."
It feels like, and I could be very wrong, one comes from a place of not being accustomed to already having what they need, vs taking for granted the things they have and "sending it forth" or whatever.
Hahaha, I'm using this in the future, just for laughs.
Lol. I would always reply with something like "That's nice, but did you also take a backup?" or "During the call???".