Funny Japanese Language Slip-up Stories

[WCR91]

I could go on and on and on, but for now I offer this one:

I was having a bad day, and my Japanese friend asked why. I replied:

夕べルームメートに侵された。・Yuube ruumumeeto ni oKAsareta. - Last night I was raped by roomate, I wanted to say awoken - 起こされた・oKOsareta - by my roomate. The listening party was quite concerned! And to compound things, my roomate was a girl. Damage control on that took some time, but the moral of this story is becareful when playing with passives.

*catches breath* Whoo, I can just picture you saying that, Peter. I haven't laughed that hard in a while.

[tintinium]

I've made tonnes of mistakes... but one stands out... and it wasn't made by me. I was at a traditional Japanese restaurant for breakfast in Shirahama and the waittress, upon an all japanese party leaving, she said "おはようございました" instead of "ありがとうございました"

I thought I only foreigners made those mistakes!!!

On the same theme... I used to routinely mix up "行ってきます" and "いただきます"　so when I was leaving the house, I was saying (roughly) "Okay, let's eat" and when I started to eat, I was saying "I'm going, be back soon!"

[Jonas]

I was talking with my ex, who is Japanese (this is a few years ago, dont worry Peter, I didn't break up with my current one ), and we were talking about one of her friends. So I asked her where her friend lives, and she answered 大阪にしんでる (Oosaka ni shinderu) instead of 大阪にすんでる (Osaka ni sunderu). That made me laugh pretty hard (shinderu means to be dead, while sunderu means to live somewhere. So her friend was dead in Osaka )

[WCR91]

Once, I was shopping at a Japanese store, and I was thinking about food. When I got to the counter and paid, the lady said "Arigatou!"

What I should have said was "Arigatou", "Douitashimashite", something to that effect.

What did I SAY?

"Gochisou-sama deshita."

Talking about receiving a weird look.

[Alfonso]

Well! I have a couple of them which are quite funny.

The first one happened the first time I was in Japan during a family stay. In Spanish (at least Spain Spanish!) the expression for wishing someone to have a good night and the salutation "Good evening" are the same and I knew only the second in Japanese and I thought it was the first, so you can imagine what went wrong! I was completely exhausted after the trip and I came from my room to the living room and told the whole family:
Me: こんばんは。
Them: 「こんばんは」？
Me: はい、こんばんは。
Them: ...

The second one is even funnier. That was four years ago during a presentation in university. I was talking about "static algorithms" 静的なアルゴリズム at a lecture room with a projector. I passed one slide and the whole room broke out laughing at the title: 性的なアルゴリズム (¡Sexual algorithms!) At first I didn't understand what was going on, then my advisor pointed it out... Since then I always double-check when converting from kana to kanji!

Cheers.

P.S.: BTW, Jonas, that story's just hilarious

[Jason]

性的なアルゴリズム

そのクラスを取ってみたいなあ。どこで教えているでしょうか。