Another friend once thought twat was a synonym of twit. First time she called someone a twat in my presence I was gobsmacked but thought I must have misheard; there was definitely nothing twattish going on.

The next time it happened I made a note to raise it privately with her later. "You do know what twat means don't you?" "Yeah, it's another word for twit." "Er, no."

I was on a voice call with a friend, and people who are familiar with me know that I'll end specific sentences with "eh" when others would use "yeah" or "you know?" instead. For example, "How times have changed, eh?" and "How'd your assignment go eh?"

They took it to mean "what?" or "pardon?" each time, and they asked me if I was confused, and I explained what it meant to them. It was funny in the sense that I assumed people knew what it meant but then I realized some people might actually find it confusing!

He looked appalled and after I asked why he had that look, he asked what I was going to do with someone's shit.

This is the shit.

A work colleague on a few occasions has mixed up “ball handling” and “hand-balling”, easily done if English isn’t your first language!

Our Austrian exchange student told us "My sister wants to be a wet".

The v sound is hard for German speakers

I've made this mistake and apparently others have as well: the words for lips (kuchibiru) and nipple (chikubi) got mixed up in my head leading to some awkwardness in Japanese.

Sounds like you don't know shit. (Standup comedy >4min)

Also your comment made me think of Jimmy Yang, who apparently knew English when he moved to the US, but not that well, not knowing any expressions. When someone asked him "what's up", he just looked at the ceiling.

As a kid we giggled at "Disney Home Video" because "Disney" is a proper noun, so doesn't translate, and "video" is "video" in Finnish as well, but "home" means "mould", (as in the fungus.)

I can't think of one off hand, but yours (E: and several of the replies) made me lol, thanks 😂

I mentioned once giving a person of the female persuasion a wide berth (meaning to avoid that person. I can't remember why, maybe she was particularly annoying or something).

My friends face made me realise he didn't know that particular word and couldn't work out what a wide birth was.

It was me who did a dumb recently. Talking to a cellist, in English: "Oh, you're a striker?".

An opposite thing happened to me.

Wanted to trade something online. The other party listed trade as currency for object or other object + currency for object.

I had the other object and thought they would pay me the currency and their object for mine. It took a while for me to understand what they were waiting for.

They seemed to be a native English speaker. It's a second language for me, so some meanings get lost in translation.

My favorite anecdote revolves around the many meanings of shit, which is hardly surprising, since the way this word is used in English is in no way forthcoming to a non native speaker.

So I was sitting in this call between my company (a medium size German tech company) and a big US corporation, discussing the development of a tool that we were doing for them. The people on both sides all knew each others at least in passing, and one of the people asked if one of my collegues was in the call, too.

Them: "So, is mr. X here, too?" Us: "No, mr. X had another appointment." Them: "Ah okay. Mr. X really is the shit." My collegues: wait...what? did they just...? Me, to my collegues: it's good, it's good, it wasn't an insult! My collegues, getting more and more aggrevated: "Did you just call mr. X 'shit'?" Them, not understanding: "What? NO!"

The Americans did not understand what the problem was, because they did not really think about what they said and that it might not be understood the way it was meant by a non native speaker.

It took a lot of explaining from my side after the call to cool my people down. They were completely bewildered, and they could not believe that calling someone "the shit" could possibly be a compliment. Me, I had a big big laugh the entire time.

My work once sent me to Madrid. I only have some high school Spanish.

I had a cold at the time and soon ran out of cough drops. My coworker told me where I could buy some more, and what to ask for.

When I got to the store, apparently I misremembered what he told me to say. I said to the woman, "quiero caramelos de mentales."

She looked at me confused. I tried again, slower: "caramellos...de...mentales?"

She seemed a bit alarmed. She said something in Spanish. I said "lo siento, no comprendo."

She called over her coworker, who asked me "what are you looking for?"

I said, "cough drops." She looked confused. "Cough...drops? What is it?" I tried "caramelos de mentales" again, no success, just confusion.

Then I remembered I had some wrappers in my pocket so I pulled one out and showed her. Suddenly they both beamed with understanding. "Ohhh! Caramelos mentolados! You were asking for 'brain candies.' She thought you wanted something illegal."

I've never had that sort of thing while personally interacting with people who speak other languages. However, when deployed I used to hear people speaking other languages regularly. So it wasn't that they were communicating directly with me, but I used to love overhearing what they were saying and "bad translating" it to english. And that was hilarious.