Due to an unfortunate series of events, I was once forced to pack all my belongings into a pair of rather big suitcases and forced to take LeMetropolitain alone. Two guys sitting across the alley from me start mocking me in Malagasy - after all, the average French-looking person in France isn't supposed to know a minor language from an island far away, right? Ten minutes later, while exiting the train, I thanked them for their help ''in Malagasy.''

Invoked by This Troper: much like Elaine Benes on ''{{Seinfeld}}'', I became leery of the amount of derisive-sounding laughter in the conversation between the girls at my favorite hair salon. I don't understand a lick of Vietnamese, but I did at least learn how to say "Hey, I heard that!" Their conversation around me seems a lot less sardonic since I whipped that out on them.

A friend of Mom's was a bus driver. Two girls got on the bus, and were speaking to each other in French about how hot the bus driver was. When they got off their bus, he bade them well IN FRENCH!

This troper decided to randomly speak a bit of Spanish, but mixed muchacha with hermana when referring to his girlfriend, and incest jokes followed with.

Something similar happened to a friend of mine approximately 20 years ago. The reason this is relevant will become clear. She and her best mate took a train journey. They got on and sat opposite an attractive young man. My friend commented on his looks... in Polish. Her mate, also Polish, agreed. Desperately trying to keep their faces straight, they then egged each other on for almost an hour, trying to make each other laugh by coming up with more and more graphic and explicit descriptions of what they'd like to do to this man, and what they'd like him to do to them, and so on. The train pulled into a station. The man stood up, and took down a knapsack from the luggage rack. Sewn onto the top was a Polish flag. He just smiled, winked at them, and got off the train.

This troper's Japanese-speaking grandfather went on a trip to Japan. One day, on the subway, he overheard two women making snide comments about him. Shortly before they left, he told them he spoke Japanese and had heard everything they said. Embarrassment ensued.

The funny thing is that, while I am French, many of my compatriots believe that I am American when they see me (must be the blond hair or something). One day, getting pissed by very insulting anti-american jokes made by people who thought I was "Un Ricain" and obviously believed I could not understand them, an answered "Vous préférez que je vous cogne en français ou en anglais" (should I punch you in French or in English). Seeing them freaking out was... very satisfying.

This troper witnessed a German exchange student get thrown out of a soccer game because the referee spoke German fluently and could tell that the player (on top of a couple of flagrant fouls beforehand) was cursing the other team in his native language.

This troper and other students went to Russia to learn the language. Some peddler overheard us speaking our native Norwegian and launched into a sales pitch in English. He seemed to be taken aback when my compatriot told him in slightly broken Russian that he had no money that day and quickly retreated.

I have witnessed this so many times in my life it has almost become cliche (comes from having Polish, Dutch, French and Finnish friends I guess). The most memorable occasion though was on a train ride with my french friend. Barely 5 feet away from us 2 French girls were chatting away merrily assuming that nobody on the train could understand them. The whole time my french friend was in stitches laughing at what they said. And then as we were leaving he turned to them, said something that caused the girls to nearly pass out from shock and left. The real kicker....he refused to translate the conversation for me leaving me oblivious as to what he found so funny.

My father once related an anecdote about meeting a group of French men in a bar, who were being increasingly rude (in French) and eventually insulted my dad, grinning as they assumed he had no idea what they were saying. Dad (who's a pretty big guy) retorted "You don't have to ''be'' French to ''speak'' French." Cue mass OhCrap from the French guys.

Happened often to This Caucasian Troper during the time that he live in the Southwestern United States. This Troper has been called several things that will not be included. But it is always worth it just look them straight in the eyes and say, "¡Vete al infierno!" (Go to hell) just to see the looks on their faces.

''¡Vete al Carajo!'' works too.

This Troper remembers a few things from his high school Spanish classes...but keeps what he has because the characters of the stories he writes swear in anything but English. This trope could explain the expressions of the couple of hispanic day-workers who spoke broken English when he asked them if they'd like cheese on their fish patties at [=McDonald's=] when he was 16, though...

As a matter of advise, It's NOT A GOOD IDEA to insult a Mexican in English in Mexico, assuming they will not be able to understand you. Many Americans, Canadians and British found about this the '''hard way'''. Or even ''worse''...

I had asked one of my classmates if he knew what {{baka}} meant, in case I wanted to call him that later, to avert this. He thought I meant vodka, and if I can remember correctly, discussion of alcohol was against the rules. There was a teacher near us... and somehow neither of us got in trouble, even when my classmate was describing vodka in surprising detail.

A particularly disliked guy in my class thinks he's safe calling people baka. Cue about ten other guys explaining what he said.

Well, apparently the word "baka" isn't exclusive to Japanese, though it has a different meaning elsewhere. This Troper found out from his friends that are taking Spanish that it means "cow". I explain what it means in Japanese. Cue the confused looks. Further continuing the bilingual lolz, I decided to greet the Spanish teacher in Japanese later in the day. (I don't take the class. Her room is next to my History class.)

I remember hearing from someone else that the Spanish word for cow is vaca.

It is. Baka and vaca sound similar, though.

They don't just sound similar, they're pronounced identically. Spoken Spanish doesn't distinguish between "b" and "v".

Baka as in "cow" is a Filipino word.

In Hungarian it means "soldier", especially a green one.

Two of my friends were arguing about something once, and one finally says to the other "ugh, you're so baka!" The other (Russian) friend responds "I'm a dog?"

A known icky guy in this troper's high school asked for a Japanese pickup line so he could hit on an exchange student from Himeji. Unfortunately for him, this troper had the poor girl's interests at hard, and told the guy to say "Watashi no chi oh nomitai to omoimasu" (for all of you who don't speak Japanese, this means "I want to drink your blood"). The girl, of course, ran screaming at this "disclosure".

Not a Twilight fangirl then?

It means more along the lines of "I think I want to drink my blood", and she probably ran more in confusion than fear.

As a Japanese speaker, I can assure you that she'd probably be more confused at the grammar of that statement than anything else...I sure am.

A friend of this troper's was in Italy and, annoyed at someone cutting in front of him in the queue for a vending machine, shouted a Polish expletive translating as "dick in your arse". The queue-jumper wasn't Polish, but a nearby girl was and reprimanded him.

This troper likes to just sit and smile as Mainlanders make snide commentary about him. It's just hilarious to have them talking, and then make an off-handed comment about their parentage before leaving. Just because I was born here...

This troper's aunt was buying a car, when she suspected the salesman was being dishonest, so she turned to her brother (i.e. this troper's father) and spoke to him in Mandarin Chinese behind the salesman's back. The salesman then proceeded to start talking to them in Mandarin.

This same troper also had an inversion: He overheard a classmate talking to her friend in Mandarin. A minute later, she turned to this troper and spoke to him in English. This troper responded in Mandarin, which broke the ice and resulted in the two of them becoming friends.

Occurs often with this troper's mother, who was an extensive traveller in her younger days and speaks several languages fluently, along with enough of various others to get by. She's good with Italian, French, most Asian languages, and German, but she's just an overweight blonde accountant with glasses and a great wit. One of the most infamous examples was with this troper's aunt, a native Korean. This troper's family is all Michigan, born and raised, so she felt okay talking to her Korean friends right in front of his mother and insulting her in Korean. Eventually, she finally responded with offense at one remark, which led to the Korean women all blanching and leaving.

This troper himself did it at Epcot at Disney World. He's taken two years, later a third, of French, and is an excellent speaker of what he already knows. At the French pavilion restaurant, he spoke in English to one of the hosts, who's native French as all the staff are, and as he left the restaurant, he gave a perfectly-accented thanks to the woman, who responded with "Pas de quoi." He later did the same with the waiter, speaking perfect French to him and somewhat deflating his ego when finding that the Americans joking about in ''his'' restaurant spoke French.

This troper is an English teacher in Japan who can, in fact, speak Japanese - but a good majority of the foreign teachers here can't, so her students assume that she can't either. This has lead to innumerable instances of students saying things they think she can't understand (though surprisingly, usually fairly complimentary things - turns out a lot of the older boys have crushes). Usually she doesn't answer back, but sometimes when they're rude she can't help it. She treasures the expressions on their faces at those times.

This troper was recently studying in Russia with some other British students. Our teacher had told us to begin with that her grasp of English was very poor, and indeed she did nothing to suggest otherwise for a long time. A classmate of this troper was particularly talkative, and said some things in that classroom that would make Ron Jeremy and Jim Davidson simultaneously blush. One day about six months into the year he was absent from class, and the three of us who remained were chatting in English amongst ourselves while our teacher readied her notes. I asked one friend as to the condition of our absent classmate, to which he replied that he was very hungover and wouldn't be coming in for at least three days. Then, completely out of the blue, our teacher piped up, in perfect English, with "why doesn't that surprise me?" Better still, when we told our mate that our teacher was in fact a fluent English speaker who had been carefully listening to everything we (and especially he) had been saying, he a) didn't believe us, and b) continued in the same vein until our teacher made a complete ass out of him a month later.

Many students in my year were attracted to the new English teacher and thus tried to sneak in back-of-the-room conversations about how hot he was in his class. The problem was that, even using Spanish and French as code languages, it didn't work because he spoke English, Spanish, French and German fluently due to a multi-cultural background and a heavy interest in languages. The result was him louding telling one girl 'I don't do that on a first date, or with LITTLE KIDS' when she kept going on in French about how he'd be totally agressive and brutal in bed. (Amusingly, there was only a ten year age difference, but as he liked to say while glaring at certain people, 'mental age differences can't be overcome'.)

A friend of my father's was on a tour somewhere in the Southwestern United States. A group of people was chasing after the bus calling the passengers Gringos. The tour guide smiled and said, "Oh, they're just saying 'hello!' Everyone here is so friendly!" My father's friend was unimpressed.

This American troper was on a train from Brussels to Bruges with his sister. His sister can speak French, and overheard two couples talking about an orgy they had.

Either these people didn't care whether others could understand them, or they weren't very clever, as most people on a train from Brussels to Bruges would know enough French to at least grasp the gist of their conversation.

This Troper was walking down a London street when she overheard 2 Frenchmen comment rather nicely on her looks. They went on speaking? comparing all the salopes (literally, sluts) they'd slept with, all along not noticing that the girl walking right in front of them had the flag of a French region sewn onto on her backpack. After the depiction one too many sex act, this troper stopped in her tracks, turn around and reminded them that a few hundred thousand French people live in London, including children, and that this conversation had better be kept for a private setting.

This happened to me at a friend's house. Her parents, unaware that I'm nearly-fluent in French, made some rather insulting remarks on my appearance on one of my visits. I never said anything, though, instead sitting quietly in the kitchen staring at the ground in humiliation.

More than once This Troper has sat in the cafeteria and listened to Japanese exchange students chat about who they've slept with since coming to Australia. After around five minutes of chat it's time to inform them, in polite standard Tokyo dialect, that since the caf is right next to the language department around a fifth of the few hundred people in earshot can understand them, then you wait for the look on their face. And you thought Japanese girls were all adorable lolis...

I have a friend who comes from a Chinese family, but considers herself British, and, until recently, never had any interest in learning Cantonese, something her grandparents were well aware of (I think you can see where this is going). So she put a lot of work into her Cantonese, and went to visit said grandparents, who immediately started commenting on her weight to her mother, in Chinese. She was not best pleased.

This troper seemed to start the whole GratuitousJapanese trend in class. Thus there was one time in class when her GratuitousJapanese-speaking friends told other people to say "kochira koso" ("same to you") when they are told "zakenayo" (a swearword) or "aishiteru" (you probably know what this means already...), which is a funny response to the swearword when you consider that "kochira koso" is meant to be polite. The misusage of "kochira koso", however, is averted by this troper herself when the guy she likes tells her "aishiteru" and she tells him... well, you get the idea.

A subversion. In Vancouver, my husband rode mass transit all the time. Occasionally, he would end up riding behind a couple of teenage girls who were giggling and talking in another language. When he was near his stop, he would listen for a break in the girls' conversation followed by laughter, and he would laugh. Then he would smile and nod at the girls as he got off. He had no clue what they were talking about specifically, but always gave the impression that he understood every word.

While in an Orthodox seminary in Israel, the ''rosh yeshiva'' (head of the seminary) was once giving a speech in English. One of the rabbis there speaks only Hebrew, a language that most people knew bits and pieces of but were not fluent in. Halfway through the lecture, he stops and says "I am ''choshed'' (suspicious) that Rabbi X understands more English than he lets on." To which Rabbi X says "''Choshed Bik'sherim!''" - "you're suspicious of an innocent man!" Doubly awesome because although he never actually ''said'' anything in English, he made it clear that he understood what was said, using a Hebrew phrase that even English speakers were familiar with, while the ''content'' of what he said explicitly ''denied'' that he understood it. The entire place erupted in laughter and took quite a while to calm down.

This troper's mother once told of an incident at a store where she worked, with two Iranian customers making vulgar comments about the cashiers to each other in Farsi, assuming that nobody would understand them. Cue shocked expressions and hasty exits when one of her co-workers started chewing them out in the same language (she was married to an Iranian American.)

An inversion, of sorts, happened with a couple officers of the local police department, and has become one of the popular stories told at the station. The two officers had rounded up several Hispanic suspects in a drug bust, and the suspects were all claiming to not speak English (a common tactic to avoid, or at least delay, questioning). So one officer says to the other in English, to walk behind the suspects, and "when I say 'now', club the head of the guy you're standing behind". So the second officer begins quietly walking behind the line of suspects, and after a short while, the first calmly says "now"... and all the suspects duck and cover their heads. Gotcha.... (Note: No actual clubbing occurred. This was police trickery, not police brutality.)

This troper and his four friends took a coach from Oxford to London. The friends took the first row and he sat behind them, next to a middle-aged woman. We were talking to each other quite loudly in (rather vulgar) Russian. One of the guys pointed out that someone else on the coach might be uncomfortable with what we were saying. Another guy then yelled in Russian something to the effect of "Whoever on this bus bullshits in Russian, raise your fucking hand!" The woman sitting next to this troper then calmly replied, also in Russian, "What's with all the shouting? And would you lot please watch your language from now on?" This troper felt like he would die of awkwardness that day.

One gentleman I know is of Russian descent and cannot speak English for the life of him. However, he can ''understand'' it perfectly, which has led to interesting moments when people think that since he can't speak English...

I have a three stories to add here:

1. Once I was travelling by the underground train in my European home city, when I heard some female teenagers talking in Hebrew, using a lot of foul words. I politely told them in the same language, that even though I am a local gentile, I do understand what they say. They started to laugh in an embarassed way.

2. One summer day, my wife and I were sitting at the beach in the same city, chatting in English, which is her native language and which I speak with an American accent. The two young men sitting next to us, were discussing their experiences of Thai brothels in our language (which my wife speaks well). A small boy walks up to my wife and asks something. My wife responds in our language. The two young men get visibly uneasy and quickly depart. ''Gotcha!''

3. During a trip to the United States, I was getting my passport checked for the trip home. The immigration officer, a Hispanic woman, was chatting with a colleague in Spanish about an absent person, who she called ''una puta''. I was taken aback that a government officer on duty used such coarse language, and commented in accented Spanish: "Tambien yo hablo español." The officer giggled and blushed.

This troper has a friend fro Mexico. Another friend wanted to know how to say a Mexican cuss. I don't remeber what she told him, but I can assure you, it was not a cuss.

Man}} This troper's sister got a new job setting up tables at a banquet hall. Some co-workers thought they'd be slick and tell her to do all the work. They ordered her in Spanish since she looks like, and is, a Latina. She knows and speaks English, but decided to play along and do the work. The co-workers were conversing to each other in English to let "the Mexican" do all the work and they would sit back and relax (Which was weird because the co-workers were also Hispanic. Perhaps my sister looked "extra Mexican" that day). My sister decided that was enough and started yelling at them and that she indeed knows English. She says the look on their face was priceless.

This Finnish troper has been on both sides of this trope. The embarrassing side: I really hate leggings, especially when they are worn with tunics.. So when I was in Berlin and saw a group of girls wearing that combination standing nearby, I considered it safe to comment "Gosh, I thought those awful things went out of fashion long ago" in Finnish. It turned out those girls... were Finnish. The hilarous side: I like wearing black and dislike tanning, so when I was in Rome one August, I wore a black wide-brimmed hat, long skirt, scarf and gloves (no, really). So, there I was, walking toward the Vatican Museums, and suddenly I heard a redneck-ish man say in loud Finnish: "She looks like she's just left a funeral". I still want to beat myself with a stick for not coming up with a snarky comment before they were already many metres behind me and it was a bit late to say anything. But still, it was funny.

Less funny example: This troper is a fat girl living in Japan. You can probably imagine.

This Troper's (Puerto Rican) father had an interesting incident of causing Bilingual Backfire many years ago. He was in a bar with two friends when he overheard a group of latinos conversing in Spanish about cornering a girl outside once she left the bar. He relayed this info to his friends, prompting one of them to escort the girl to her car where they were suddenly attacked by a mob of 7-9 other latinos, most likely friends of the ones inside. My father and the other friend rushed out to help, and subsequently kicked the attackers asses (Justified as they were in the military) before the police were called. Those that failed to run away in time were arrested.

This troper knows a enough of about half a dozen languages to smile and say 'hello, wonderful weather today?' in any language. The only time she got a chance at causing backfire was at an anime con, where people had been insulting my costume (it'd ripped and I had to repair it with Duct Tape). Needless to say the look on their faces when I smiled asking about the weather in Japanese was priceless.

This troper is South African and bilingual (speaking both English and Afrikaans). A while ago I was visiting a cousin of mine in London. So at the end of my visit, on the train back to Heathrow, I heard two people sitting behind me gossiping about me, in Afrikaans. I just turned around and said: "Dagse dames, buitegewoonlike lekker weer vir hierdie kant van die wereld, isit nie?" (literally: "Hello ladies, unusually pleasant weather for this part of the world, isn't it?"). The look on their faces was absolutely priceless! Obviously they'd heard me speaking in English earlier, and figured that someone who spoke English with a Received-Pronunciation accent wouldn't be able to understand, let alone speak, Afrikaans. Coincidentally they ended up on the same flight back to South Africa as me - funnily enough they seemed to be trying to avoid eye-contact for the whole six hours (I wonder why), though they did become less pale about half-way through the flight.

This troper's father used to speak German like a native Berliner. He was once on a train in Germany, in a compartment with a German man who he had been chatting too, when three American nurses came into the compartment. One of the nurses assumed both men were German and tried out a halting greeting. The German man began to mock her mercilessly in German. Father listened politely, then turned to the nurses and greeted them in English, with his pronounced Bronx accent. The German went white and left the compartment. This troper's father then got to travel with three beautiful girls alone in his carriage for several hours.

This Troper once had a roommate who was from Bolivia. We hated each other, and she would often say insulting things about me to her mother in Spanish when she called home. One thing she didn't know was that I am proficient if not fluent in Spanish (and few people realize this because I'm white). I let her talk crap about me for a week, and one night, as she was wrapping up another insult, I turned away from my computer and said "¿Tu sabes que entiendo todo lo que estás diciendo, verdad?" (Translation: "You realize I understand everything you're saying, right?"). The look on her face was priceless.

This happened to someone this tropette knows. There were 2 women standing right behind her, and they were talking quite rudely about her in Spanish. Guess who happened to know Spanish?

This troper's mother, while traveling in Guatemala, once had to sit on a bus for eight hours with two quite rude men sitting behind her. Although she's never explicitly told me what they said, from what she has shared I inferred that they were describing in great detail what they would do to the pretty blond gringa in front of them. About two hours in and fed up with them, she turned around and said "En boca cerrada no entran moscas!" (Which is about the Spanish equivalent of 'loose lips sink ships' although a direct translation is more like 'In a closed mouth, no flies will enter') The men were completely silent for the six hour duration of the trip.

This tropette happens to have transferred from America to Korea. Some people immediately assume I can't speak Korean, and well... Hilarity Ensues. Although I've had my share of hearing very rude remarks...

Variant. I'm Korean, but I'm constantly mistaken to be Chinese. One time a Korean woman said something rude to me, and I being genuinely confused asked her why she was being so mean. Cue her embarrassed reply that she thought I was Chinese.

This Swedish troper and her friends were on a train. It was very crowded so we were standing by the doors, when two guys our age came walking by, carrying a large wooden box. They were speaking English (we deduced from their dialects that they were probably American), and said some really rude things about us in a way that made it clear that they didn't think we could understand what they were saying. We were quite baffled, since English is a language that it's very stupid to assume people don't speak.

A friend of mine was taking spanish class in junior high, and I wasn't (I didn't have good enough grades). He kept showing off his new knowledge as often as possible by saying various phrases. After a while I realized some of those were insults. One day he called me a name while pretending he was just saying something random, but this time I actually knew what it meant and said "that's not a nice thing to call me" then said "Cesse d'être un cul" (french for "stop being an asshole"). He stopped after that since he found out I was taking French and could pull the same thing.

I never let on to my neighbors that I understand 100% of what they say to each other in Spanish. After all, average white guy in suburban America doesn't speak Spanish. :) (He does if he was an interpreter in the safety dept. of a slaughterhouse.)

Though I once accidentally informed an entire floor of workers that if they move the giant fan, they need to be sure to inhale the ducks (inhalar los patos). I intended to instruct them that they needed to ''install the feet'' (instalar las patas). The slip was due to my tongue not being where I intended it to be. But such a slip causes little confusion as the intended meaning could easily be picked up from context. It did cause them to joke about it for the rest of the week.

Another time, I was advising the English-only insurance secretary how to fill out the new online worker's compensation forms. A floor worker was filing a claim in English with her and one of his friends was walking through the office to get an ice pack. The worker filing the claim told his friend in Spanish that he wasn't really injured but he couldn't afford to take a week off with no pay to work on his roof. I didn't let on that I understood what he said but after the form was filled out, I told the clerk not to submit it yet because I made a mistake. After the worker left, I told the clerk what he had said. I didn't see him around after that.

There were two incidents, one that happened to me and one to a friend of mine. I passed by a store with my friend one time where there were a bunch of spanish-speaking guys who looked like jerks about as much as they sounded like jerks. So when they took one look at me, they figured it was ok to make snide remarks about an ignorant non-spanish-speaking person by calling me a dumbass and so on and so forth. Cue their reactions when both of us understood it and my friend made a passing remark (in Spanish) that their manager would ''love'' to hear how they'd like to shove his head up the fat ass of this dumbass American (me), and in fact may tell him that right now. (We didn't, but it was fun watching their reactions). To repay that, there was another incident that this same friend was being harassed by a weeaboo who wanted to hook up with her and figured broken Japanese is the perfect way to prove they're worthy of getting in her pants. I don't speak fluent Japanese, but I knew enough that his vocabulary (when not utterly broken) mostly consisted of kawaii desuness and futomaras (big penises), so I snuck in on the conversation (it was on IM) posing as her boyfriend Mayakashi, who is a mean, bad-ass brute who eats babies, intimidating him when I started screaming insults at him in Japanese to a point he tried to tell me to calm down in Engrish (yes, even in English its broken), and thus scaring him away when I didn't stop. Unfortunately he didn't realize my "insults" I shouted was more or less boiled down to "Osu!", "Yosh!", parts of the Dona Dona songAnd by "parts of the Dona Dona song" I meant shouting what could roughly be translated as "How did that one song go again? Dona don...[[DidNotDoTheResearch What else did Hakkai say? *friend points out (offline) that Hakkai didn't know the song much either* Oh... Well... Uh... Link! He come to town! Try to save, the princess Zelda! When he walks a-away, you don't he-ear me say- *friend asks (again offline) if I'm singing the Zelda song or Simple and Clean* I'm singing shut up!" ]] , and other such nonsense like "I loves mah bukkit kitteh, do YOU loves your bukkit kitteh, kupo?!", and "Mayakashi" meant "fake", giving us a cheap laugh for the rest of the day.

Not exactly this trope, but my dismal Korean skills has my mother working very hard to improve them. She now does not appreciate being able to understand my snark.

This troper's dad, while in college, was practically fluent in German. He had some choice words to say about his Business teacher... the predictable happened.

This troper has been fluent in Spanish since she was a toddler,and has worked in food service since high school. With my accent (Castillian with several Cubanismos) and looks (pale skin, dark hair, very dark eyes, and short and curvy), I can pass for Cuban or a Spaniard. Given that a lot of the food service workers around here are Latino, in previous jobs this troper has been mistaken for someone who doesn't speak much English, and has had comments made about various physical attributes that are very prominent in a tight black shirt like what my uniform used to be. Cue the hilarity when I say in perfect English to have a nice day.

It also works the other way. The grill workers at the local HuHot had no idea I understood their comments about me until I took my plate of food from them and said "Gracias, pero ya tengo una novia." The looks on their faces....*grins*

This troper's Danish stepgrandfather was having car trouble, and walked into a store searching for the part he needed wearing grungy clothes, covered in gunk from fixing the car. While he was perusing the clothing section for something to wear instead of his grungy clothes, two ladies chatted to each other in Danish about how gross he looked. He turned to them, smiled, and asked in Danish if they'd like to buy him some shirts, then. They were so mortified that they did!

This troper was once eating in a restaurant with a friend of his when they saw a pretty girl eating at the next table. We then spent a few minutes talking about how desirable she was (in Japanese). Guess who else in the restaurant spoke Japanese?

At one point, this editor was on a message board where people were debating fictional languages (It was for ''TheElderScrolls'', so I think they were talking about Daedric, but I can't remember), and someone mentioned that, since Elvish has a vocabulary and grammar rules, and people speak it, it's techinically a "real" language. Their next few posts were written in Elvish, at which point I came in basically calling them nerds in Klingon. Although I had no idea what they were saying and I used an online translator.

This troper is an American who has for many years lived in Canada; specifically, in Quebec. I spoke French before moving there (though, as I like to say when I want to piss off my francophone friends, I speak French, not Quebecois). I was traveling back to the States to see family, and going through airport security I handed over my US passport to the security officer, who upon seeing it began speaking English to me. He rummaged through my carry-on a bit, pulled out the sandwich I'd packed, then turned to the guy working next to him and said, "Je vais voler ce sandwich" ("I'm gonna steal this sandwich"). I responded with something like, "Non, c'est le mien, allez trouver votre propre" ("No, it's mine, go find your own"). The security guy dropped the sandwich back into my bag, said to his friend with a complete deadpan, "Elle parle français", and proceeded with the rest of the security check in French.

This troper's family friends had two Italian exchange students staying for a week. While they were in the kitchen, the mother was making dinner, and they were making rather unkind comments about her weight and physical appearance. Sample comment "And there she walks, the fattest, ugliest cow that ever lived", to which she replied, in flawless Italian (she spent 10 years in Italy before she got married) "And there they sit, the two rudest little sh*ts that ever lived". I sadly wasn't there, but the expression on their faces was apparently nothing short of priceless

This troper hangs out with a girl who likes to dress "Ghetto Fabulous" during lunch. She is often mistaken for my girlfriend and on my way back from lunch, a group of kids saw us and decided to make a comment about my "novia puta". I approached them and retorted with "Recuerden que mucha gente hablan el Español bien y pueden entender que dicen ustedes. Piensen antes de hablar. Y ella no es mi novia, prefiero los hombres." I don't think it was perfect but it got the point across. Made even more funny by my status as "Speaker of AMERICAN!"

I am part-Turkish, living in London and am also a {{Goth}}. So, this one very late night (or very early morning) I am waiting at the bus stop on my way home after a night of clubbing, dressed in full Goth getup. Two middle-aged Turkish women came to the bus stop and upon seeing me, one of them said "Gosh! Look at the cat-chopper!" ("Cat-Chopper" being a term that originated during Turkey's brief experience with SatanicPanic) I just turned to them with an incredulous expression and said in Turkish "Cat-Chopper? Really? Sister, please don't talk stupid...", sprinkling it with some Turkish colloquialisms to drive the point home. Wasn't the best comeback but it did the trick.

This troper had a funny moment during the middle of a math's class, wherein one student kept snarking in japanese... which our teacher is fluent in. Subverted when it turned out he knew and deliberately did it because he knew only she could understand him.

Happened with my friend's dad who's Caucasian, but takes an interest in Chinese. He was visitng Chinatown one time and a couple of the store clerks began talking about him in Cantonese. Cue the expected reaction, when he responded back in the same laguage. I also had an incident with this trope one time when I went up north to visit my aforementioned friend and when we went to a water park, people thought I didn't understand English since I'm Chinese. Oddly enough I speak extremely broken Cantonese, but perfect English and suprise ensued when I ordered something from the cafe.

Subversion: There was an incident I heard of where a fellow made a complete fool of himself at a Japanese Tea Ceremony, which his Japanese girlfriend demanded he attend. He deeply offended her grandparents when he "refused" to speak to them. After the ceremony was over, he bawled her out, saying she knew he only spoke English and didn't even know he was being addressed. He also said that he couldn't even apologize now because he didn't speak Japanese. Her grandfather overheard this, and revealed that HE spoke very fluent English.

Everyone this troper knows thinks he knows little Spanish, or no Spanish. He is very fluent in Spanish, though unable to speak it; his family speaks Spanish most of the time, but they even think he doesn't know it.

Comment une page peut-elle avoir un gros cul?

Sono kotoba ga wakaranai. Nihongo de itte kudasai. no kana in potholes, it breaks it.

אתה יודע כמה זמן לקח לי למצוא תרגום לזה?!

我不明白你们说了什么!

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Esta página é toda boa... havia de a foder por trás e fazê-la implorar por mais.