For language teachers or students: has a student ever unintentionally said something very embarrassing?

Question

Regale us with your stories at their expense...

Just today I had the pleasure to meet the wife of one of my students. After polite greetings, the student and I went into his office to commence lessons. Wanting to ask what I thought of his wife, he sat down at his desk, folded his hands together and said, 'So, did you pleasure my wife?'

There are plenty of examples like this but this one was recent and especially hilarious. Any you'd care to share (under condition of anonymity)?

Answer 1

In my first Spanish class, the teacher once called on a student to conjugate the verb "pedir" (English translation: "to ask for") in all the persons. It's an irregular verb, but the student made the mistake of conjugating as if it were regular, so he said, "Yo pedo", which could be translated as "I fart". The teacher tried really hard, but she couldn't keep the smirk off her face.

My ESL students occasionally come up with pretty good ones, especially if they use their dictionaries incorrectly, although frankly I'm so used to it that it doesn't catch my attention too much. One that I remember hearing about is when a student wrote a writing assignment using the word "intercourse" instead of "communication" or some other appropriate synonym. The funny part was how the teacher who told me about it said that she tried to convince the student to use some other word, but he/she stood firmly on "intercourse".

Reading the previous answer reminded me of the classic mistake that female learners of Spanish often make. When they are trying to talk about embarrassment, they often use the false cognate "embarazada", which means pregnant. I once heard about a woman who had been called up to speak in church by the bishop (the leader of the congregation). She announced, "El obispo me embarazó". She was trying to say that he embarrassed her, but she really said, "The bishop got me pregnant." Imagine the surprise!

Answer 2

When working as a teacher, I happened to ask two seven year old girls I was teaching what they wanted to do when they grew up. Promptly they stated that as adults, they would move in together and become gay-o-sexuals.

When I moved to Germany seven years ago, my German-vocabulary was quite a disaster. My first night out alone, I went to a cafè and ordered "Ein Kopf Cappucino", which translates into "One head of cappucino". In my native language of Norwegian, a cup is called "Kopp", whereas in German the word for cup is "Tasse". Albeit my scarce knowledge of German at that time, I knew that many words are similar in German and Norwegian. Hence, I reasoned that I could use the Norwegian word for cup, pronounced with a German accent and get away with it.

Needless to say, upon requesting a head of cappucino, the waiter gave me a somewhat bewildered look.

Answer 3

I'm bilingual (speaking Greek and German) and have attempted to teach both languages. The errors made by some students of modern Greek are mostly not translatable, but here you have a few examples:

1)One nice lady, instead of encouraging her guests to eat a kind of pumpkin pie, invited them to eat a cheese-s**t-pie!

2)Instead of ordering squid one guy ordered "one portion of good morning".

3)The owner of a Greek restaurant hired a self proclaimed teacher of the German language to translate a menu. Nobody ordered zucchini, because the "teacher" had translated it as "nonsense with ears"

Answer 4

I only tell those I've done.
I told my German host family 'good naked!' every evening.
I've told people in French that I was pregnant when I meant that I was full.
I could go on. These kinds of errors are part of language learning!
(Anguished English by Richard Lederer has some hilarious examples of such errors.)

Answer 5

There's a Swedish term for bright red: Knall Rod (with umlauts over the "a" in Knall and the "o" in Rod)

Much to the delight of the students I went to school with, the stupid American in the class (me) pronounced it "Knull Rod" - which translates loosely as "f#*k red". Hey, it made sense to me. Red is a sexy color, right?? I never lived that one down.

Answer 6

ONE OF MY STUDENTS WROTE IN HIS JOURNAL:

1. I love being in ESL. I love fellowshitting around. (correct spelling: fellowshipping).

2. Class activity, asking questions: I overheard one student asking his fellow student: Do you swim underwear?

I have more if you email me.

Answer 7

I was teachin a chinese gal Australian once and she called me a

sirry plick.


I corrected her she was meant to say I was well hung..

Answer 8

What ever you do, don't tell a Mexican guy word for word "kiss my a$$."

It does NOT have the same connotation.

Answer 9

What does "embarrassing" means to you?