Sunday, April 16, 2017

Incomplete Picture

That feeling when you're missing words in a foreign language and laugh at the wrong time


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I won't ever laugh at what happened to your grandma.


7 comments:

  1. Oh, the bittersweetness of this.

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  2. When I was first learning Thai I had this experience many times. I swear that guy said something about a watermelon! He just laughed at my response.

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  3. With how fast the Spanish speak, I am always playing this guessing game

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  4. Oh God, this legitimately happened to me. Laughed out loud after someone apologized for his absence the previous week due to his mother's funeral. People glared while I wondered why.

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    1. Smooth. What did you think they were talking about?

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  5. Oh, the joys of missing pieces and misunderstood words! When I was twelve, my class was on an exchange stay in England and my host family asked me - as I thought - if I wanted to ride a bike. After some confusion and no bike anywhere, I figured out that they just asked if I wanted my packed lunch in a bag. I was pretty embarassed.
    But one of my friends had it much worse. Her host mum showed her a photo of a baby and said: "This is my daughter when she was born", and my friend, seeing the red face that a baby has just after birth, thught she was saying "when she was burnt" and responded with "I'm so sorry." She got some weird looks!

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  6. (Maybe it's obvious but perhaps I should have mentioned that I'm from a non-English speaking country and didn't have much command of the English language back then.)

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