False friends

[Laufey]

Translation: "Mum, that one, that one, that one, please!"

I think we don't yet have a thread for false friends...

(False friends: words or word combinations that sound identical or almost identical but mean different things between two languages, hilarious misunderstandings very likely.)

The reason why I randomly wanted to start a thread like this is that I was going through some old family photos and found one from Faroe Islands with a sign saying "bert ferðafólk". In Faroese it apparently means "for travelers only", but in Icelandic it's "naked tourists". This also reminded me of another old favourite of mine, the Finnish word "hallitus" (= government), which amuses Estonians on occasion. In Estonian - if memory serves - it means mold.

[Daéa Reina]

This also reminded me of another old favourite of mine, the Finnish word "hallitus" (= government), which amuses Estonians on occasion. In Estonian - if memory serves - it means mold.

Oh, these are really fun!

Just for the record: in Portuguese, "hálito" means "breath" as in "you have bad breath" (Você tem mau hálito).

[Haiz]

As was pointed out a few days ago in the general thread, in Norwegian "dress" means suit, so that allows for some fun mixups

I know several others, but right now I can't come up with anything... other than the fact that "stol" in norwegian, meaning chair, is pronounced exactly the same way as "stul" in czech, which means table. Not exactly the worst thing to confuse

edit: hang on, remembered another one! The czech word for snot, "sopel", sounds a lot like the norwegian word for garbage, "søppel". Not too alike, but it lead to my little brother once yelling "I DON'T HAVE GARBAGE IN MY NOSE" at my grandma once

[ParanormalAndroid]

Spanish has plenty. I think I've got a list somewhere, actually.
(Bear with.)

[Ana Nymus]

Ooh, I know a Spanish one! "Embarazada" sounds like "embarassed", but it really means "pregnant". That was a fun Spanish class when we all found out about it (after having thought it was a cognate for years).

[zetkaj]

False friends are great! I mean, they're awfully confusing, but fun.
There's probably a ton of them, but ones I remember now (from Polish) are: dres, which means tracksuit; fart, which is a rather rarely used word for luck; smoking, meaning a tuxedo. The word for hangover, kac, is pronounced similarly to German Katze...at least similarly enough to laugh at it :d'

edit: hang on, remembered another one! The czech word for snot, "sopel", sounds a lot like the norwegian word for garbage, "søppel". Not too alike, but it lead to my little brother once yelling "I DON'T HAVE GARBAGE IN MY NOSE" at my grandma once

It is the same (I guess?) as the Polish sopel, though. Which means icicle.
On a related note:my big confusion as a kid was the word jahoda, which means a strawberry in Czech, but is almost identical to Polish word for blueberry (jagoda). I spent some time wondering why is this blueberry icecream pink.

Ahh, I wish I could remember more! I like confusing things.

[Fenris]

Bæsj. In Norwegian, it means poop. In swedish, it means beer. Cue jokes about the quality of swedish beer.

[Auleliel]

In Japanese, /consent/ (コンセント) means electrical outlet, /home/ (ホム) means train station platform, and /punk/ (パンク) means flat tire. These supposedly are all loan words from English...
(I put what it sounds like to an English speaker in // and the Japanese spelling in (), in case that wasn't clear.)

[Krisse Kovacs]

Hungarian-swedish stuffs?

in Swedish, Öl means Beer.
but in Hungarian Öl means “it kills”

in Swedish, Kaka means Cake
but in Hungarian, Kaka means Poop

Learning swedish is so much fun, however the bra, fart, slut and so on are so well swedish (or scandinavian) words.

Ando "here" means testicle in hungarian

[Daéa Reina]

Ooh, I know a Spanish one! "Embarazada" sounds like "embarassed", but it really means "pregnant". That was a fun Spanish class when we all found out about it (after having thought it was a cognate for years).

Yes! This one!
I mean, "embarazada" (spanish) and "embaraçada" (portuguese) sound almost EXACTLY the same way. But in portuguese it really means "embarassed". This has been a great source for jokes in my family. XD

I need to make a list of spanish/portuguese false friends: there's a lot. Mainly because they sound a little alike, and most foreign people think it's all the same thing. And portuguese and spanish speakers must remind them that no, they're DEFINITELY not the same thing.

[viola]

The french word for seal is phoque, which doesn't look like a false friend but when said out loud sounds extremely similar to a four letter English explicative starting with the letter F.

The Icelandic (and Swedish) word for 6 is sex, which can occasionally cause some confusion for English speakers.

Also in Icelandic word kind is a sheep, in English it means nice, and in German it means child. I once heard a joke about a German who asks an Icelandic sheep farmer how many 'kind' he has, to which the farmer replies over 500 and then the German faints.

[Bobriha]

I'm late here, but here are my two cents for russian:
In russian the word стул (stul) means chair. The word ягода (yagoda) means berry in general.
Another one, in many slavic languages the word uroda (or alike) means beauty, while in russian урод (urod) means the directly opposite - ugly.
In comparison with english: the russian word for english velvet is бархат (barhat) and english word for russian вельвет (vel'vet) is corduroy. I've found out it just several days ago. Guess what I was imagining when I heard "Her skin is like velvet" .

[Nimphy]

Hmm, right now I can only think of Italian "verde" (green) and Albanian "e verdhë" (yellow). It caused much, much confusion.

[kjeks]

dritt => Norwegian connected to poop while
zu dritt, der/die/das dritte => means third in German.

[Nimphy]

Ooh. I KNOW. English "arm" . Basically I was five, and in my very first English class. I already knew a bit of English, so when the teacher explained to us that "arm" meant well, an arm, I wasn't confused, but a boy started pretending to have a weapon ("armë"=weapon). I think this confusion is shared by many a language.