Funny misunderstandings

Vikram, Vikram! You get the prize!

and i remembered another one...

A friend has a rather annoying habit of translating everything for me, even when its not really needed, like for the price of a taxi fare.

I reckon my chinese numbers are fairly solid so the last time it happened i wanted to say "不要当我是傻瓜“ Dont take me as an idiot...

but i got the 'idiot' word mixed up and said 不要当我是刮痧”（gua sha being the scraping thing).

didnt really get my point across...evidently i have to stay an idiot.

Oh dear my tones are the worst around. Im lauhged at constantly in't office. I only get by through a reasonable vocab, helped greatly by daily infusions of Cpod.

It seems anyway people generally accept Ill never be dashan and do there best to understand the slobber that comes out of mouth.

Anyway got a little titbit for you. Not so funny perhaps, but still... Itll waste 5 minutes.

After a presentation from my sales director on something about new fuses or whatever he asked me direct.."有意义吗?"

I heard "有异议吗”and proclaimed loudly "没有”。

Much shock from Mr Big Manager and the rest of my colleagues ensuid. Took a few minutes of analysis to realise my mistake. But by that time the meeting, and my rappour with the boss, was long finished.

yours,

chitty

billm,

Very funny.Yes,it would be one of my best remembered and favourite Get Smart scenes;very funny and a great one to quote.I know what you mean.I can't believe how often I say something in Mandarin and they don't seem to understand at first,and then they finally catch on by repeating me and translating correctly to English.And when they do catch on and give the correct pronunciation ,I'm thinking "isn't that what I just said?" I do know of course that the fault is entirely on my side and probably mostly has to do with getting my tones right [and the rest of the fault with my pronunciation ]. So now that you point it out,I can see that  maybe I am morphing into a western version of "the Craw" .lol.

What about "Craw" Syndrom...fans of the old "Get Smart" show will know what I'm talking about.

This is a situation where what you hear yourself saying is not what is actually coming out of your mouth....thereby creating a do loop.

Claw:  "Smart, I'll rip your lungs out, because I'm the Craw."

Smart: "Listen Craw, would you believe I have 1,000 Control Agents waiting outside to apprehend you."

Claw: "It's not the Craw, it's the Craw!!!!!"

Smart: "OK Craw, would you believe.....

Vikram, a great story, I laughed so much! At least your friend drew a box with his fingers rather than something with curves.

vikram,

That gave me a gut laugh.  I'll have a menu as well.

very funny story vikram :)

jamestheron,

thanks for the funny youtube clip.The mischievous wrong translations reminds me of a funny scene from a movie called "Kung Pow" [which is a martial arts spoof I can highly recommend;hilarious ] ,where a character called Wimp Lo is upset when he misses out on being the "chosen one" and is told by the master to sit down as it is then explained that he was trained wrong in martial arts as a joke.

A clip of that scene is here at :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpe7myCczD8

but it is in Spanish by the sounds of things [couldn't find an English version of that scene ];maybe JP will appreciate it .

Hilarious story, vikram.

Although the measure words are different.
（一杆 or 一根 or 一支） vs. 一个...

Hilarious stories guys!

My experiences with wrong tones happened in a bank when i asked the lady in the bank for a pen  messed up the tone for pen.My chinese colleague had a big laugh and it was the talk of the office that day.

This other incident when my friend forgot the word for Menu(菜单) in a restaurant and he went

"wo yao mei3 nu3" drawing a box with his fingers haha!

Perhaps the "Tone Police" is the CPod version of the Monty Python Hungarian Phrasebook sketch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YYM209GJoE

funny story Bill.It reminds me of that scene in Monty Pythons "The Meaning of Life" where Mr Creosote is encouraged to have a wafer thin mint...

One of my mispronounciation mistakes that got a big laugh was at a business dinner with suppliers. 

One of the first phrases I had learned in Chinese is: 我吃饱了 (wo3 chi1 bao3 le); I'm full meaning :"I'm satisfied, I don't need any more food."

Earlier in the day of the incident I had learned the phrase: 我迟到了 (wo3 chi2 dao4 le): I'm late in arriving.

Toward the end of the dinner I was urged to eat more and I replied: wo3 chi2 bao4 le.  Everyone laughed.  I said, I know I'm funny, but not that funny.  What did I say?

There was some discussion about what each person heard.

Some thought I said: 我吃暴了。"I ate and exploded"...a very embarrassing thing to do ate the dinner table.

I think the other version was 我迟暴了。"I arrived late and expoded".

My 4th tone pronunciation was very strong, so there was no doubt about the explosion.

thanks luhmann;great video;spot on

Well, I usually don't get the tones wrong, but my word order and vocab didn't use to be particularly correct, especially when chatting online. 比如说 "这是一个他做的歌剧。" "我们才聊天以下吧" Ouch.

Amongst my Chinese friends, I'm infamous for messing up on two syllable words, though, turning them around, e.g. yù mǐ > mì yǔ , so at one point I managed to confuse the heck out of them explaining that we grow riddles.

I have studied Chinese on my own for merely 11 months so I'm optimististic I'll one day have weeded out most of these 口误s.

That video is hilarious, I'm particularly fond of the scene during which the shop vendor cracks up witnessing the slap...

@ Knut What kind of uniform are you wearing in that avatar?

I remember my friend's mum laughing at me when I asked her to please pass me a 背 (bèi) instead of a 杯 (bēi)。 Till today I still have problems with the 1st and 4th tones.

Uh oh, better start getting my tones right... :)

haha.. great video.. :)

2:47min the slap in the face got me in stitches XD Who are those guys? They're not the usual faces like Ken and John.

The Rocky exercise bit reminded of that SNL show where they made fun of Arnie.

"Hi we're tone police and we're here (hands clap) to 'tone' you up"

ha ha ha ha, see what I did there? ha ha ha aaaaa.....................

Funny mistakes can get you into trouble...

Joannah. The hanzismatter website, has to be the best, have been a fan for a while.

The incorrect tattoos thing amazes me. You'd think that if you were going to spend a lot of money on a tattoo that was going to be with you for life that you would do your research properly wouldn't you?

joannah,

Thanks a lot.Yep,that's exactly what I was after.I had seen plenty of Chinglish sites ,but none where English speakers were messing up the Chinese,though I have heard several tales of funny tatoos.Can't wait till my character recognition improves so I can read the tatoos with Chinese characters which seem to be quite popular now.

Do you mean english speakers messing up chinese? if so try http://hanzismatter.com/

yep,I'd be first in line to buy it.

Actually ,if anyone knows of any already out there,or any websites [the reverse of the chinglish websites ] then I'd love to know.

Actually.. I think you could write a whole book of short stories on this subject, from both sides of the equation.. and it would be "good value"..

Ken,

ps I still think your qing3wen4/qing3wen3 mixup story is hard to beat.Very funny.

I met with a friend in Xi'an, to go hiking one morning. She was with 3 girl friends of hers, and I was the only guy. So I thought I would say, wow I'm lucky. And I didn't quite remember well the word.. so I tried, and Bang: 我很性欲 came out instead of 我很幸运。It is grammatically incorrect, but they laughed hard.

Great stories above.I love this topic;the stuff of good humour.I posted my story on a post about a week ago but it was in an old lesson so this might be the place for it.

After one of your lessons I finally understood where I went wrong a few weeks ago at a Chinese restaurant.At the end of the meal I wanted to compliment the staff on a wonderful meal ,and thought I was using the word xi3huan to indicate like.The waitress seemed to perfectly understand me and replied "you want to wash the dishes" which sounded more like a statement than a question.My family were in fits of laughter at this,while I was scratching my head trying to figure how I could have got it so wrong.It was a very large restaurant ,so it was lucky that they let me off the hook this time.Thanks Ken for contrasting the xi3wan3 with xi3huan.Nothing quite like learning from one's mistakes.

I've mentioned this before in previous posts but it's something happened after listening to ChinesePOD on my MP3 player on the way to work.

I was ordering coffee at a place where I used to practise my mandarin with the people who worked there, and after ordering my coffee (in English because it during the early morning rush) she asked me how much sugar I wanted in my coffee..

I stood there with a blank expression on my face as she repeated her question, "sugar..?". I was trying to work out what "Shu4 ge" meant.. :) Then I realised and told her what I thought she said and we had a little chuckle over it. :)

So it's kind of the reverse of what you are asking.. but still funny in a way.

Hi Ken,

don't know about concrete, but I think I posted the story about the honest teachers before somewhere (which I cannot dig up anymore). So let me try again:

Long, long ago, before the ages of CPod (1997), we had our wedding banquet in Beijing and we took a flock of friends and family from Germany with us.

Those days my Chinese was in a rather "Lower Newbie" stage. Tones? Unimportant. Grammar? "I Tarzan - you Jane" style is the most efficient way to communicate. Characters? Who wants to learn those? Lists of nouns! That is the cool stuff. Yes, I already knew 挖土机.

The evening after our arrival we were - of course - taken to a restaurant by my in-laws. We were distributed among two tables, both mixed with Chinese and German.

I sat together with my parents and parents in laws while my wife was over at the other table with my friends. So I came into the uncomfortable position of being the one who had the honour to introduce my parents to my in laws. I tried to explain that both my father and my mother are teachers.

"Wo mama laoshi". Everybody on the table nodded their head in earnest understanding. "Wo baba ye laoshi". Again agreement - flooding my intestines with pure proudness.

Then my mother in law asked me: "Ni ne?" And I answered: "Wo bu shi! Wo bu laoshi!". To my amazement everybody took my answer as a joke.

老师

老实

When I was first starting Chinese, I learned that TaiTai meant "Mrs."  Since XiaoJie seemed to work as a perfectably acceptable form of address to young ladies in Taiwan, I assumed that TaiTai worked as an adequate substitute for Madam.  Accordingly, I addressed a matronly lady as TaiTai (I was 25 then); she good naturedly informed me that we were, in fact, not married.

I haven't made any "funny" misunderstandings when speaking Chinese yet. But one of my Chinese friends has a way of coming up with English expressions that are quite amusing.

For example, she asked me:  What do you do in times of "blue ruin" ?

It took me a few minutes to figure this out, but I finally concluded that she was referring to situations where you are feeling blue or depressed.

And so I responded..."In times of blue ruin I..."

There was another situation where she asked me about an English movie that she liked. She asked "what was the role of that two lens woman".

Now, I thought "two lens" was really odd. Then it suddenly came to me that she was really talking about the actress who appeared in only 2 scenes in the movie.

Other stuff she said was mildly amusing...such as, "OK, we can go for dinner, but no sexy".

But "blue ruin" is my favorite new English phrase. I'm going to form a new rock band and call it "blue ruin".

i am lucy ,a chinese girl.i want to meet Foreigners , we can help each other.i have blog at```mixedfriends.com```under the name lucy520. you guys can add me

This is not my personal experience, but a friend of mine who is American Chinese told me that when her brother visited relatives in China for the first time, he had the idea that 马马虎虎 （ma3ma3 hu1hu1) meant "Wonderful! Lovely!". Actually, it means "so-so".

So at every meal served to him by his mother's senior relatives, he took the first bite of every dish (the VIP's privilege), watched intently by the entire table, and then pronounced it, "马马虎虎!"

Ouch.

Ken,

Actually, while we're sharing...

I was talking with a Chinese friend about going to eat at a local Sichuan restaurant, that, while famous in my area for having wonderful food, is simultaneously notorious for always adding way too much 味精 wèi jīng  (MSG), into the food.

So we're talking about what we wanted to go eat, and I was saying I wanted to get some 水煮两样, shuǐ zhǔ  liǎng yàng . 

For those out there who don't know what that is, it's a Sichuan dish with Cabbage, Meat and Peppercorns swimming in a thick, red and spicy broth.

I was telling her that the food (at this particular restaurant) is delicious, but they always put in way too much MSG, so this time, I really need to remember to tell the waitresses to hold the MSG.  千万不要方味精 (qiān wàn bù yào fàng wèi jīng ).

At least I THOUGHT I was telling her that.

In reality, what I was saying was, 这次我必须记住告诉服务员千万不要方月经! (zhè cì, wǒ bì xū jì zhù  gào sù fú wù yuán, qiān wàn bù yào fàng yuè jīng )

I was going on and on like this, and in the meantime she started busting up! 

For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what I said that made her laugh, I kept asking, "你为什么笑我呢?"

She replied, "这是为什么水煮两样那么红吗？因为月经放得多呗"！

Oh man, was that embarrassing!  I'd pull out the old, "Was my face red" cliche', but I think in this case it just might be in particularly bad taste!