Not a foreign speaker, but I've also wondered how foreign travelers respond when they see a sign that says "Stay off shoulder" on the road.

Yes! How confusing! 😂

I took Spanish as my language requirement in college. true story: a server late at night, Mexico, no one else in the restaurant asked if he could practice his English on us. Sure.

What is your name he asked. My husband's name is Robin I said. He replied...OH...Roberto. I shook my head no. In Spanish I told him Robin was a little red bird. He looked shocked, said he must have misunderstood. Now we were attracting attention...several servers came over. I explained to my husband what was going on. 🤣 My husband started flapping his arms like a bird....lots of laughter.....no more English was spoken. The waiter thought his name was a girls name. A boy named Sue....type thang....I explained it was a normal name for a boy....Tracy...Leslie...all got brought up.

I took many years of french in school...not that anything useful stuck (Ou est le drapeau?!?) But I always thought mon petit chou was a weird term of endearment and I never understood what pomme de terre had to do with pommes. They are potatoes and apples to me...nothing similar about them....of course in english we refer to road apples which are entirely another thing!

When I was in high school, our exchange student from Chile always said, "Piece of pie" as an expression she picked up in America. We kept correcting her and saying, "No, it's 'piece of cake!'" She could not understand what the difference was in difficulty between a piece of pie and a piece of cake. Frankly, I find pie way more difficult to make than cake, but that's another story . . .

My favorite words to learn in German were random: "sogar" which means "even" and "gummi" which is an eraser. I used to joke that if I ever had kids I would name then Sogar and Gummi.

My favorite scientific/Latin name for a tree is the scientific name for the dawn redwood tree, Metasequoia glyptostroboides. It took me quite a while to memorize that name and spelling for my dendrology (tree science) course in college. So happy that today I could find a way to work it into a conversation. I keep trying to drop the Latin names for trees I pass by, but folks just roll their eyes most of the time, imagine that! ;)

Yes @Zalco/bring back Sophie! 😂I think jumper is a cute word for sweater…but of course if i hear an American use it I think of a sleeveless overdress kind of thing. 😂

@User I would have laughed so hard seeing your dh flapping his arms!

And pommes de frites @Annie Deighnaugh!

@l pinkmountain German is so hard! One of my childhood friends was a native German speaker, and her entire family spoke German at home almost exclusively. She moved to the States at age 9, and remained fluent in German while becoming completely fluent in English. She did study English in school before moving here, which probably gave her a head start, but it really is amazing how much easier it is for children to learn a nee language. She didn’t even speak English with a German accent! Her sister who was 2 years older had a very slight accent. Her parents had very heavy accents, ofc.

I picked up some words here and there while at their house, but they spoke so quickly! all these years later, I remember how to say ”Wie schneide ich meine haar?” (how do i cut my hair? so random! 😂) I miss her…she passed away when we were 30 in an accident. I wish I had asked her more about stuff like this,

I Pink, I had a Puerto Rican coworker who refered to an easy project as a ”piece of meat”. 🙂

I'm pretty sure Germans cut Haare, not Haar (hairs plural, not hair singular). Weird linguistic differences.

I'm a native speaker, but I've always thought the phrase "How come?" for "Why?" was a strange one. I guess it's from "How did this come to be?", maybe, I guess...But the harder you think about it, the weirder it sounds.

The word I thought was weirdest learning German was Wirtschaftwissenschaft, which means economics, because besides being a mouthful it has "schaft" in it twice (suffix akin to "-ship" in English, like relationship). Wissenschaft is science and Wirtschaft is economy, but Germans apparently saw no need to economize on repetitions of schaft when they combined the two.

Cawaps, my dad used to tell about a teacher who, if a student started a question with ”how come” corrected them with ”how does/did it come to be”.

Dad also had an employee from Ukraine, and this was in the ’60s and ’70s. You know how, when something happens and you can’t do anything about, and you shrug and say ”well, what’re ya gonna do?” Her phrase was ”What you can do?” We were all so charmed by it, it became one of our ”family expressions”.

Language is a fascinating study, especially how it changes over time and distance!

Italians find it odd that in the US we use the plural form of spaghetti, penne, farfalle, etc but miss the mark entirely with lasagna, the singular form of the noun. Lasagne would be the correct form in keeping with our use of spaghetti, etc.

I’ve heard several funny anecdotes of Italians asking for butter — burro — in a Mexican restaurant.

Nancy, I imagine you have seen this Fawlty Towers scene, but just in case.

PS Manuel is an Italian in the Spanish version of FT. And since we are on the subject, Andrew Sachs's (Manuel) native tongue is German.

I particularly like the road sign "sleeping policemen" - English and Caribbean for road bump to slow traffic.

Native speaker of English here, but I think it's similar to us as children learning and figuring out words and phrases. I have a STRONG memory of noticing a sign that said "No Elbow Driving" when a neighbor man was driving his kids and me somewhere and asking about it. It's puzzled me for years because all I ever saw was 'No Shoulder Driving' signs. I finally figured out that he must have made a joke about driving with your shoulders (and probably tried to demonstrate), then moving on to something like, "I wonder if we can elbow drive?" And that's what stuck in my memory.

I remember my mom saying (when I was complaining) "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride." I've never fully figured that one out.

I teach 6 year olds and my group this year are really challenging me (in a good way). They are so interested in vocab, word origins, and spelling patterns. They are always asking me why a word or saying is the way it is in English. I usually have an answer, but sometimes I just throw my hands up and tell them I'll have to get back to them about it b/c English is a wacky language. Which reminds me that I have to go confirm the origins of the -ty at the end of tens numerals like twenty.

nini, fun fact, the rule of thumb is that if you acquire a new language before age 12, you will likely not have an accent, but after that, you will.

My bff‘s family moved to America, from Italy, when she was 8. She does not speak English with an accent, but her slightly older siblings do. She didn’t know any English when she was enrolled in our local school. She is still bitter about being given a first marking quarter grade, instead of an Incomplete, in English & Reading. Her grades went from an F to D to C to B. I said maybe they wanted to show you your progress? But what she remembers is the failing grade on an 8 year old adjusting to a new country, new language, and new life.

My teenage nephew is an English, German, and Swiss German speaker. When he was about 4, one of us (non German speakers) asked him the German word for something or other. He said “How would I know it in German when I just learned it in English?” and I’m still laughing about that. Touché, kid (to add yet another language into the mix 😆).

When his teenage sister was around 4, she turned to one of us and asked “What’s the German word for fork?” In her everyday life, almost all the adults she knew (parents, most of the friends of parents, preschool teacher) were bilingual. She just assumed all adults were. 😆 Not the last time her aunties were a disappointment to her.

I remember my mom saying (when I was complaining) "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride." I've never fully figured that one out.

Oly, that is a saying in my family as well. I take it to mean if wishes mattered, everybody would have what they needed. So if a wish were a horse, you would have one and not be stuck on foot.

Daisy, does your school use Michael Clay Thompson’s books? Sounds like those kids would love them, if only as an additional resource if not as the curriculum.

Thanks Zalco, I’m sure that’s it, but I think I’ve always taken the ”beggars” too literally in today’s context, instead of looking at it to mean the poor.

I did a summer homestay in France. One of the children in the family was 3. The other American with me was learning a new French noun, and asked the little girl if it was "masculin ou feminin". The little girl had no idea. I asked her if it's "le _____ ou la_____”. THAT she knew.

That is so interesting @bpath…it is so fascinating how children learn language.

I have a current student who is from Germany, and she does great, but if we are doing something like a student conference presentation, I need to check her English for clarity. She has a very slight accent, and most people would not even notice.

In my previous job, way back we had a database of nutrition information of supermarket foods, and some of the students who worked on the project were international, so it was quite a learning experience for them to learn about all the different products in American supermarkets and how many brands of the same product, like canned tuna. They would say they have that in their country but not so many brands and types. One thing I remember we had to tell them root beer is not beer like Bud Light, how to categorize it in the database. I can’t think of any others off the top of my head.

Yes…root beer! Great example of a confusing compound word if you have previously learned ”root” and ”beer.” It definitely doesn’t make you want to drink it😂

What about peanut butter? I wouldn’t categorize it under ”butter”, which is dairy, or ”peanuts” even though it IS peanuts.

Yes…peanut butter! So NOT butter!😂