Safer jam (English/French)
When I first arrived in France I was living with a French family. One of our dinner conversations was about the differences between French food and American food. I wanted to express just how fresh French food was compared to American food which contains lots of preservatives. Not knowing the correct translation for 'preservatives', I just said the English word with a French accent. Well I was very pleased with my comment but I didn't quite understand the dead silence that followed ... that is until later when I found out that ±è°ùé²õ±ð°ù±¹²¹³Ù¾±´Ú means 'condom' in French! So, basically I was saying that Americans eat jams, sandwich spreads and other foodstuffs with tasty condoms in them! What a lovely impression I must have made!
Sent by: Stephanie
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This exact situation happened to a friend of mine in our language immersion class in Italy. He was trying to describe the delicious freshness of the Italian pizza... From then on, we had many jokes about pizzas!
Wow! It is very odd that you have never encountered that in America, Mandy.
Yes - always a tricky one. I well remember the blank incomprehension then gales of laughter of my French-speaking colleagues when they encountered a document calling for research into more environmentally-friendly wood preservatives (ouch). Best to avoid using words like this in quite a lot of European languages.
I also read this in a site about learning Polish that a word in Polish sounding very similar to preservatives also means a condom. And, I also recently learned that "rubber" in British English (what we call an eraser) means a condom in American slang, which for some reason I am unfamiliar with, being born and raised in the States.
Not exactly a false friend - but a good way to make new ones ...
I spent a few weeks on work experience in France, and at the end I was expected to type up the inevitable report. I knew that French for to type was 'taper', so I couldn't understand the red faces when I announced I was going to spend the weekend doing 'tapinage'. It took a very embarassed colleague to explain afterwards that this was in fact prostitution!
The same problem applies to Russian too :)
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