Job Discussion Forums

[Kurochan]

I've read that in the Middle East you should be careful not point the sole of your foot at somebody -- it's an insult.

In southern China, if a woman smokes in public, it means she's a prostitute and is looking for a customer. Female tourists sometimes get mistaken for hookers because of that.

I heard about a funny linguistic one from a Greek person the other day. She asked a Chinese person what her favorite fruit was, and the woman said, "I like to eat pipa." Pipa is slang for *beep* in Greek, so that was a shock. Of course, the pipa is an instrument here too.

[Stephen Jones]

[Snoopy]

Not cultural so much as lack of idiom. An English girl, asked by the French host family, was asked if she wanted any more to eat.

"Non, merci, je suis pleine." Muy embarazada.

[Lyov]

Once my girlfriend was reading my Mongolian notes and somehow I had written "I love milking horses!" I have no idea how that got there but it became a running joke and was difficult to kill.
Frequently Mongolian art depicts couples performing crazy sex acts on horseback. If you say that isn't possible it is quite offensive because of course Mongolians are excellent horsemen.
Another fairly common theme is a catte man performing sex acts on his cattle. This is certainly something as a foreigner you are not invited to talk about. Supposedly it is no longer practiced but I wonder...

[dmb]

The Turkish word for bored is sıkmak(used as a verb) and the word for *beep* is sıkmek. When I fırst started learning the language I was always telling people I was f?cked when in fact I was bored. It took me a couple of years for me to feel comfortable using those words

[yaramaz]

... and the other quirk to watch out for in turkish (at least where I was-- maybe its not in Istanbul too- I'm not sure I want to ask) was the fact that 'umm'- as in hemming and hawing, or 'am' as in I am- sounds just like the word for a lady's lower bits (er, beep?) and that to say you are sick/sik (as in ill) was basically admitting to being a gentleman's lower bits (beeeeeep).

Ergo, saying I am sick was a rather risky affair. My students taught me this in my first month in Turkey, thankfully, though I did have to endure endless laughter the first time I said it.

[thehairyhorse]

I thought people in Chile were generally disposed to talk about other peoples weight challenges so my surprise when I called my female boss an ugly fat bitch was interesting.

[XXX]

It happens all the time. In Russia, never give a girl an EVEN number of flowers. Why? you only send an even number to DEAD people. In Korea. spitting is okay. In fact, it could be considered an olympic sport. Blowing one's nose is very offensive. And then there was the time in Poland when a friend of mine odered cream of mushroom soup in Polish. Due to his accent, he ordered cream of female genitalia soup. I thought his girlfriend was going to loose control of her bladder and the look on the person behind the counter was not to be missed.

[carnac]

I was in love with a Middle Eastern woman who asked me if I had ever had Middle Eastern food. Trying to appear worldly, I replied that I loved eating couscous, not realizing this is purely a North African Arab dish, not Middle Eastern Arab. She got a horrified look on her face and exclaimed "DON'T SAY THAT!!!" I said, "Excuse me? I only said I liked eating couscous!?" The look I got convinced me that maybe I should change the topic.
Much later I discovered that in Middle Eastern Arabic, the sound "cous" refers in a slang way to female genitalia.
Ya never know.