The Russian word for jail-break literally translates to break-jail, meaning this tropers Russian parents went around telling everyone about the "break-jail" they heard about on the news.

This troper has lived in Russia all his life and knows no such word. Neither do any dictionaries. In fact, there is no word for jailbreak in Russian.

Related story: The same parentals, fresh off the borscht boat, headed for a grocery store looking for beer. They found some, then returned it, saying it was sweet and tasted like soda. This is because they had picked up ROOT beer.

This Troper's grandmother is fond of telling a story where she was riding in a cab in France some years ago, and asked where the train station was. Unfortunately, the words for "train station" (''gare'') and "war" (''guerre'') are fairly similar, to the point where the cabbie turned around and told her "The war is ''over.''"

*stares* My dad told me the exact same thing happened to him. Well, minus the cab, but everything else was the same.

And this troper accidentally said "arse" instead of "tail". In front of a class of eight-year-olds she was teaching. (The first is "cul" and the second is "queue," pronounced similarly except for the length of the "u" sound.)

They're not pronounced similarly. Queue is pronounced with a larger opening of the mouth than cul.

To be absolutely pedantic, one is a rounded back vowel (the same as English "oo"), the other is a rounded front vowel (like German ü). There's no difference in length, but to an English speaker, it ''can'' sound that way. I once had the pleasure of a late-night bus ride enlivened by overhearing a conversation in which a native French speaker was trying to teach two university students the difference between the sounds. Thing is, being a native speaker doesn't necessarily help here; unless you've actually studied phonology a little, you probably don't know what exactly the difference is well enough to explain it to someone else. If you've grown up perceiving the two as separate phonemes, it's instinctive to you, and it's easy to be baffled when other people just don't get it.

A school friend of this troper's mother had a cold in Paris. She walked into a pharmacy and attempted to ask for medicine "pour un toux" (for a cough). But she said "trou"--hole. And was directed to suppositories, hemorrhoid creams, and so on. She let others communicate for her for the rest of the trip.

And someone else his mother knew called for the cops ("Gendarme!") instead of the waiter ("Garcon!") at a French restaurant...

''Please'' tell me ''someone'' said "At ''these'' prices, we need 'em!"

Same here! SmallWorld, eh?

This troper once freaked out a Korean cab driver by trying to say "rain" (''bi'') and actually saying "blood" (''pi''). Repeatedly holding up a potential weapon (umbrella) and saying "blood blood blood" is not very socially acceptable, regardless of culture.

This troper's father told a story from a trip to Mexico in his twenties, during which he had injured himself (if memory serves, it was in a motorcycle accident). He went into a pharmacy, intending to say "I am in great pain, may I please have some painkillers?" but it came out as "I am in great pain, may I please have something to kill me?" Wish I could remember how the Spanish went...

I might be wrong, but perhaps something like ''Tengo mucho dolor, por favor me da algo para matarme?''

The US Military's Defense Language Institute is a virtual goldmine for this trope

One Korean linguist attempted to describe his house (''jip'') to his teacher, but ended up telling her that he had a two story vagina (''sship'')

Another Korean student, upon being promoted to Corporal (''sangbyàng'') was presented with a banner congratulating her on her venereal disease. (''sàngbyàng'')

A Turkish student (I don't speak Turkish, so no examples, sorry) accidentally told his teacher that he had sex with every female in the barracks twice, when he meant to say that he ''annoyed'' them all.

It's fairly common for Russian students there to mix up the words for "to write" and "to piss". Both are spelled the same (pisat') the only difference being where the emphasis is. Of course, this troper kept on doing it just to screw with his teachers.

A friend of mine (no, ''actually'' a friend) once stated that I owed him a Coke in French. He said 'cok', as in 'coq', which means 'cock', both as a rooster and the other meaning. The teacher corrected him to 'coca'.

Actually it only means rooster in French. The teacher corrected it only because it made no sense, not because it was vulgar.

This troper has heard several people writing or pronouncing the Spanish word for year without the squiggly thing on top of the n, so they say "ano" (which means "anus") instead. This troper find people saying "I have thirty anuses" in a completely serious face quite amusing.

That'd be a Tilde. Years, anuses, we all have 'em right?

And the letter's a ñ. It's called eñe, and it's the same sound that the French represent by writing 'gn'.

I'm sure they said "tengo treinta anos", is a common mistake but yeah, is pure comedy gold.

My Spanish teacher actually used that as an example of why pronouncing the tilde is important.

There is (at least was) a restaurant in Lima called ''Los Años Locos'', one article/phoneme slip by a girl in my year three class and she'd been to The Crazy Anus for dinner the previous weekend.

Fun fact: "United States" sounds almost exactly like the Dutch for "You fuck up completely." This troper's mother learned that while explaining something to her eight-year-old niece.

This Dutch troper would like to correct that translation, 'Je naait het steeds' is more 'you keep screwing that' or 'you keep sewing that', depending on context.

I've caused a few of these in my Japanese class. Some are unintentional (saying "The room is terrible" (hidoi) instead of "The room is spacious" (hiroi), for example), but some are just to cheer up a bored class (changing one character so "I eat lunch with my American friend" becomes "I eat my American friend's lunch").

And then, of course, there's the classic ikutsu/ikura mixup, which changes the minor faux pas of asking a woman's age into the major one of asking how much she costs. Happens in just about every beginning Japanese class, including mine.

Other common Japanese screwups: Saying "the child is scary" (kowai) rather than "the child is cute" (kawaii). Or "I eat the cafeteria" instead of "I eat ''at'' the cafeteria," or "I eat my friend" instead of "I eat with my friend," which are a cases of messing up particles.

This troper did something similar when he was first learning American Sign Language. The typical "phrase" for this kind of thing is but I had gotten in the habit of dropping the "mean", as it usually wasn't necesarry. Turns out I asked the teacher how much she costed. She responded without skipping a beat.

A schoolmate of this troper in Spanish class added an extra i to the word for "pen" and ended up repeatedly asking the teacher, "Do you want my penis?"

Your buddy was probably pulling your leg, then. The spanish word for pen is ''pluma''. The word for penis is ''pene''.

In a talkshow, a Spanish speaking guy ended telling a lady he was trying to woo "Do you want some penis?" instead of "Do you want some peanuts."

This troper spent a full year in the US asking people, every time he had written something and needed to erase it, for a "rubber".

In a similar vein, this (Aussie) troper once had a fellow (Aussie) chorister say that he had a rubber if anyone needed it (for erasing pencil marks after a concert). The (American) conductor then noted, completely innocently, that he was really prepared. Which cued peals of laughter from ''everyone''.

While searching for a laundromat in Mexico, my dad's friend accidentally told a pair of teenage girls that "We would like to wash our clothes in weak soup." He didn't figure out why they walked away snickering confusedly until long after he got back to the hotel.

This troper pulled one of these when he was first learning Russian a couple years ago. A brief Russian grammar lesson: By adding a prefix to a verb, you can change the meaning of said verb, and sometimes it is idiomatic. In this case, "konchit'" and "zakonchit'" both mean "to finish", but the first one is a very different kind of finishing. HilarityEnsues when he asked his female friend "Ti konchila?" after dinner, as opposed to the appropriate "Ti zakonchila?"

This mexican troper heard about this friend who was learning english, and she was doing OK, but then she made a terrible mistake on a translation: She translated "One More Time" as "Un Mas Tiempo" (A Plus Time)

This troper's German recitation was beautiful in this: one classmate, trying to describe a young woman, instead of ''junge Frau'', said ''Jungfrau'' - literally "young woman," but more commonly "virgin" - and another, in trying to say ''Tante'' ("aunt"), said ''Tünte'' ("male transvestite"), thus giving the entire German class their main weaponized insults for the semester. This troper, it must be said, didn't really help . . . phrases like ''Ich möchte alle die Leute auf der Erde schlachten'' ("I'd like to slaughter all the people of the Earth") are fairly grammatically interesting, but rarely conducive to any actual classwork.

"Rarely conducive"?! You ever spent a French class translating the opening cutscene to ''Link: The Faces Of Evil''? "Bien sûr, ici est tres ennuyeux." "Mon gars, tous les guerriers sincere rechercher ce paix!" "Je penser à Ganon fait!"

A daughter of my mother's coworker attempted to say...some sort of greeting in Mandarin but actually ended up exclaiming 'I have hair on my heart!"

This Troper's Spanish class had trouble with pronouns. Namely, they kept leaving them out. Resulting in sentences such as "I ate at the theater" and "I drank at the theater and then later went out and ate with my friends".

You meant "prepositions", right?

This Troper's mother knows some Spanish, and a friend of hers knows a great deal of English, though she is not quite fluent. Thus, the two have fun trying to speak each other's language, both in spoken conversation and in notes left for each other. At one point this troper's mother got the words ''esposo'' (husband) and ''espejo'' (mirror) mixed up. Hilarity Ensued.

This troper's Spanish teacher spent his teenage years in Argentina. Once, early in his stay, he asked a woman in the supermarket where the milk was. She looked at him strangely and backed away fast. Later, talking to a native friend, he recounted the situation, repeating exactly what he had said. It turned out he had inadvertantly told her she was lactating. Ooops...

ThisTroper frequently says ''dolor'' (pain) when meaning ''dolar'' (dollar) in Spanish. It's also nice to correct people when they accidentally say "I have shit" when they mean "I am afraid".

This troper once did this ''twice'' on one Japanese test. First he was prompted to "ask your teacher for a letter of recommendation", and politely asked for the teacher to "write a mirror (kagami)" instead of a letter (tegami). He then proceeded to also mix up "to graduate" (sotsugyou) and "occupation" (shokugyou). Even worse, he realized after the fact that the teacher was probably looking for it as a verb (hataraku, "to work"), making it a complete NonSequitur.

This troper (same as above) has also seen someone else talk about pants (in the American English sense of the word, "trousers" to the British people), then suddenly jump into GratuitousJapanese and use "pantsu". Unfortunately for them, the Japanese word "pantsu" comes from the ''British'' English "pants" (which is "underwear" to Americans). Hilarity Ensued.

This troper's frind, whose second language was specifically British English, was told he had "nice pants" by a well-meaning American. Neither of them had the slightest clue what the other person took that word to mean.

This troper learned that online translators are evil the ''hard'' way when she used one to translate words she didn't know how to translate herself into Spanish for a project. When she presented her project, the teacher had no damn idea what the hell she was saying.

This troper has found that this problem tends to be averted if you use relatively inclusive online ''dictionaries'' instead of auto-translators.

This troper's friend had a teacher in high school who spoke English as a second language. She once told him "That should take something out of your shoulder."

Stories about young Norwegian transfer students not very familiar with English swear words getting in trouble in American schools after mumbling the word "skitt" to themselves are many. The word literally translates to "dirt", can be used as a very tame non-curse word along the lines of "darn", and is pronounced exactly the same as the English word "shit". Yeah.

Apparently, the German (I think...) word for virgin sounds ''a lot'' like "good and tight".

No, must be another language but not German. The German word for virgin is "Jungfrau" which doesn't sound like that at all.

The German word ''Gesundheit'' sounds like that, but it doesn't mean "virgin". My guess is someone's been pulling your leg.

This troper is Spanish. Her English class provides her with multiple examples of this, but she can recall even more from elementary school and junior high -- such as a classmate saying "I want to eat soap" instead of "soup" (4th grade or so). She's in 10th grade now, and they haven't improved much. A few days ago, a friend of hers went, in an actual presentation in front of the whole class, "What do musicals liked Mrs. Lippe?" Both the teacher and her started giggling, and he corrected her friend; she had meant to say, "What composers did Mrs. Lippe like?"

This troper was once in Spain attempting to buy soap at a laundromat. He innocently asked for "jamon". Receiving only confused stares, he then tried "sopa". It was only then that he realized that Spanish for "soap" is "jabon" and that he had just asked for ham and soup.

A waitress in this troper's family once tried to practice her Spanish by telling the cook that the customer didn't want any eggs. She first said "no tiene huevos", (lit. "you don't have eggs"), then tried to correct it to "no quiere huevos" ("you don't want eggs"). Unfortunately, "huevos" is also slang for "testicles". This turned out to be especially funny to everyone in the kitchen since the cook was known as the most flamboyant queen for miles around.

This mexican troper's mother. She once called Gap and explained that she was a "Cucumber" instead of a "Costumer". Yes, they hang up on her.

When I was studying Japanese, I meant to say 'I'll see you tomorrow morning!' to my friend in said language, but it somehow came out as 'I'll see you on tomorrow's foot!'...It was interesting, to say the least.

You know how the same word in German means Ghost and Soul? I once saw something move seemingly by itself and made a failed joke by asking if anyone present had a soul.

This Troper's been in Sweden nine months, and thus had a few slip ups with the language. The funniest one was definitely her getting her prepositions mixed up in a text message. She tried to ask her friend 'are you at my house?' by asking 'är du på mitt hus?' (are you on top of my house?). Cue friend calling up a minute later, crying with laughter, before explaining what she's done wrong. (the correct phrase, by the way, is supposedly 'är du hos mig?')

Someone I knew once tried to do this intentionally with a translator, English to Russian and back. Frustratignly, it didn't work. English to Russian to French and THEN back to English, on the other hand...

A kid in my French class was trying to tell us that he was born in Seattle. The proper phrase for this would be "Je suis né à Seattle." But he got mixed up and assumed that the verb 'naître' had a past participle ending with a 'u,' as many other irregular French verbs do. The result? "Je suis nu à Seattle," which means "I am naked in Seattle."

Frankly bizarre variation/inversion involving loanwords: this troper's father was hitch-hiking around France, and paying for his way by doing odd jobs. After doing some painting for a vintner, he realised that there was nothing he could use to clean the brushes, so he walked to the village and tried to buy some turpentine. Apparently, after some time trying every pronunciation he could think of, he gave up and described what he wanted. The shopkeeper's face lights up with comprehension: "Ah! ''Le white spirit!''"

I did this intentionally with Google Translate, using the "Take off every zig" line from Zero Wing. After loads of translations, it turned into "Please zigzag every week".

I tried reading Chinese classic "Quantangshi" on Wikisource, but it was only in Chinese, so I tried using Google Translate's website-translater option. I got this: phrases like "Harmonic stone beasts", "Fragrant sea turtle feast", and the surprisingly poetic "The beginning of a round fan cover//No hanging on the nursery workers//Is this the Immortal".

This is used in a Hetalia skit we're preparing for a con. Norway will say something in Norwegian, and Japan will translate it as something ridiculous.

This troper's teacher once tried to say "I like german beer because it doesn't have any preservatives" ut thought the german word for preservatives was preservatieren. This is actually the german word for condoms. Hilarity, embarasment, and psycologically scarred germans ensued.

This site intentionally does this by putting your translation through up to 56 languages.

A lot of my pre-GCSE French class, forgetting that non-reflexive verbs don't need the reflexivity, produced gems such as "I eat myself."