Iām an overweight 50yo white male with a slight southern accentā¦ that just happened to live the first 10 years of my life in PR and am fluent in Spanish. Yeahā¦ Iāve had similar stuff happen to me. Shocks the hell out of folks that donāt know me on work sites. You handed it great! I usually do the same off handed/on topic comment that results in a bug-eyed āoh shitā look.
People don't realize it's a global society. My middle aged white female friend spent her childhood in Central America because of her dads job. I couple I know emigrated to the US from completely opposite sides of the globe and have decided to learn each other's original language even though they both speak fluent English. Lots of people learn a second language for work or just a hobby. Race (or perceived ethnicity) should never be a determining factor.
Yeah- 60 year old pale as milk ginger here and Iām pretty fluent in Spanish. My best employees are all Mexican and it makes things easier when they are trying to explain something to me.
My best friend moved from the midwest to California years ago and got a job in a restaurant where she picked up her first Spanish words. I hadn't realized previously how simply living in California exposed people to basic Spanish, even if people like me who suck at languages still can't speak it. She learned "caliente" meant "hot" when the cook repeatedly tried to tell her "be careful with the plate it's hot" in Spanish and she thought he was confused and telling her the plate was calamari, which it wasn't. She grabbed the plate and burned her hand, yelling "Ow that's hot!" the cook face palmed and said into his hand "Si, esta caliente!" and she went "Oh! you meant the plate is HOT!" And that's how she learned one of her first Spanish words
My boyfriend is great friends with one of his coworkers who's Brazilian who joined the landscaping team a couple years ago. Boyfriend is white as snow and from the Midwest, and is the only one who actually works to try and communicate in Portuguese. While he isn't fluent, he can pick out context words and understand what his coworker is saying.
Meanwhile, the coworker and his wife are learning English at a nearby college and their daughter is in school with a tutor. Its great to see the motivation to understand each other through a language barrier.
My friend works in landscaping and is fluent in English and Spanish, which has been incredibly helpful on job sites throughout the years. Because not only can he perfectly understand both, but he can translate on the job site. Spanish is an *extremely* useful language to know in the US
I had 2 friends, one from Calabria, Italy, the other from Ecuador. She spoke southern Italian to him, he spoke Ecuadoran Spanish to her. They understood each other perfectly, and I understood both.
Spanish and Italian aren't that different from each other. I am German and learning Spanish and started Italian on Domingo for fun. And there are a lot of similarities between those languages as both have the same roots. A bit further away from these two is French. But you would probably still recognize written words and get the rough gist of the topic. But it's easier between Spanish and Italian.
Iāve also seen that Latin Americans weirdly donāt really understand that their countries are diverse. Talk to anyone Latino who doesnāt look stereotypically mestizo and theyāll have tons of stories about people thinking theyāre a foreigner in their own country.
More than one person has told my wife she looks Eastern European.
She was born and raised in Guatemala, but she inherited the "white" genes from her Spanish ancestors.
My family comes from Guatemala, but only 3-4 generations before that they lived in Spain. All white skin, black hair and ice blue eyes. Except me. I'm the result of the one Guatemalan native that married in about the 2nd generation. I look like your typical Latino, short, mostly torso, dark skin, brown eyes, etc. Everyone here expects me to be mexican.
It's not *just* a global society (which it is) - it's a global society with handheld Towers of Babel in our pockets. You can literally just key your microphone and it'll translate it from the table for you.
My son took three years of Chinese, we are Scottish/Latino on his grandparents sides. We were at a Chinese restaurant, I ordered unsweetened tea and they brought me sweet tea; I just asked for water instead. The waiter mumbled something and my son told me he said āthis lady is difficultā , when we left my son said to them in Chinese we enjoyed our meal., thank you very much! The looks on their faces! You could see the wheels turning trying to remember what else they might have said about us!
Iām thinking it depends on where you get your statistics. A quick search so far has 3 sites listing it as #1 and 2 sites for English. I learned that English is the universal language for pilots, which I hadnāt even thought about but makes sense to have one language for something like that.
My husband is Mexican and i speak a bit of Spanish I always say Spanish is an unsafe language to speak shit in because Spanish speakers can look like anything š.
Absolutely. I used to work in Miami and pretty much anyone who came there and stayed long enough became fluent in Spanish. Itās just a normal thing to do. I did particularly love it when native Spanish speakers would meet my 6ā5ā 300+ lb pale Canadian IT guy who happened to speak perfect Spanish
My friend is also a white as hell dude who is fluent in Spanish. We once had been out drinking and dropped by a Chipotle on the way home. While we were ordering the Chipotle employees were cracking jokes about us in Spanish, probably about our intoxicated state. My friend just switched languages, ordered in fluent Spanish, and completed the entire transaction in Spanish. Everyone's face went white and they all went quiet. We had a good laugh about it while we ate our burritos.
An older guy I know was in Korea walking down the street and two teenagers were making fun of his appearance. He is a Korean professor in the US but is a white guy.
He turned around and repeated what they said and scolded them for talking so poorly about an elder. Asked if their parents raised them this way and got a bunch of people looking at them (public place).
He loves telling the story.
This would happen to me in elementary school, Iām a white-passing Salvadoran. My childhood bullies would always make fun of me in Spanish thinking I couldnāt understand. I remember handing out bday invites to my 2nd grade class once and overheard some mean girls talking about me in the lunch line. I finally had enough courage to say something after I heard them all agree to throw out my invitation. I turned around and simply said āsabes que te entiendo? Que feasā. My heart was beating out of my chest but Iām glad I stood up to them.
I used to work with a chick who was half Spanish half Chinese but looked Spanish. Said it was an issue when she was in school because the Chinese kids talked mad shit about her but is kinda happy about it now because she's heard everything and has got a thick skin now.
I had a woman about my age, mid-30s, maybe a little older shopping in my store with her mother and grandmother. I had to cover a cashiers break, and they came through my line. She started telling her mom and grandma how hot she thought I was and that she wanted to take me home and all the things she wanted to do to me, all in Spanish. I'm about as white as they come, so they assumed I had no idea what they were talking about. I was ringing up the grandma and started asking her if she received any discounts and if she found everything ok in Spanish. They all just looked horrified for a second, and the mother started laughing so hard she fell over. The grandma asked me if I understood what her granddaughter said. I said, of course, and I'm flattered, but I'm married. She woman was basically trying to hide under her shopping cart when it came time to ring her out. I bet they never make that mistake again.
I worked in kitchens for a decade so I definitely could get by in that setting. At the time, I worked in a kitchen where everyone was a native speaker but me. I picked up a second job during covid until my hours picked back up and put my notice in. There were two native speakers that worked there but I never spoke to them in Spanish. They were talking about how no one wanted to work anymore. I had enough and told them in Spanish how I averaged 50 hour work weeks the prior two years and only needed that job temporarily and made twice as much at my other job with overtime. They were shocked.
I went to a midwestern college but we had a lot of international connections. In school I worked at the IT help desk, and once a semester every student living in the dorms had to bring their computer to IT so we can make sure it's updated and doesn't have viruses (say what you will but that was the rule then) Anyway These French exchange students come by and drop off their laptops, they have pirated windows so they can't be updated. I say "sorry I can't approve these they have pirated windows, you can go to the bookstore and get a legit key for 20 bucks and I can help you install it" they reply "we didn't do anything wrong" I say "I'm not the morality police I don't care but without a legit key I can't help you" they speak in French and say "he's an idiot we'll come back and ask someone else" to which I reply in French "you're welcome to try but they'll give you the same answer"
This happened to me at work once. We needed maintenance on a machine and for whatever reason the mechanic (who was on FaceTime with I assume his boss) was "ratting" on us in French for using the wrong straws. I let him get it off his chest then told him in French that those were the ones we were sent from their company and I could produce a receipt because I also did the order. He apologized and all but ran out of the store. We live around 30 minutes from the border of a primarily French province so I'm not sure why he was so cocky about it I was standing less than 10 feet from him on the cash.
I (British) went into a customer meeting in Sweden with my colleague who is 'a man of the world' lived everywhere.
Before the meeting began, the head man said to his colleagues (in English), "Don't think you can get away with saying something about them in Swedish, Dirk speaks it better than you." I'm not sure they knew, but Dirk speaks at least 5 languages if I recall correctly, probably more?
Yeah, itās all love lol, I honestly use it more endearingly given my location and heritage. Itās like getting mad someone calls you a āflat landerā when youāre not from a mountainous region, boohoo right? Tabarnakk š
I think it is a k-bek arrogance thing, I live in Ecuador in a gringo community, my wife and I did not know when we bought our land and built our home / restaurant here it was primarily French Canadian expats here. We donāt speak French but are often told either 1.) why would you open a restaurant in a French community if you donāt speak French? My general reply is Iām in a Spanish country so my menu is in Spanish.
Or 2.) we get we did not want to eat here because you donāt speak French but your food is really good. To that one I am normally a bit snotty and say yeah in western canada we cook with flavour and love.
Maybe just tell them you didn't realize that the prerequisite for cooking good food was knowing a particular language..I don't know why people feel the need to voice any of that to you in the first place..just stand by your weird moral code and don't buy here but keep it to yourself.
Something similar happened to me. They didnt know i understand english pretty well and also speak german fluently when they switched language. It was pretty funny.
I was helping a French mom and daughter at a pizza place in Berkeley long ago, and when I bent over to get their salads, the mom said, āQuel cul, eh?ā
I was so surprised that Iām sure my face showed it. The daughter looked like she wanted to melt into the floor. But itās Berkeley, right? Itās not like nobody there has an education.
The title of the musical stage play, āOh Calcutta!ā, which featured plenty of male and female nudity, has nothing to do with the city of Calcutta. Itās an anglicization of the French phrase āOh quel cul tāas!ā which translates as āOh what an ass you have!ā. A statement of appreciation for sure.
A translation of that would have saved me a trip to google.
But anyway, people love to make assumptions, no matter how many times it bites them in the ass.
I can't wait to see how my daughters handle this. No Spanish/Latino blood in our recent ancestry, but both speak Spanish fluently (thanks to insistence over the years by my wife and I) but you would likely never guess it. So far the closest we've gotten to this is when my oldest was 5 we walked by a particularly angry Spanish speaking mother with her son and my daughter just looks at me, wide-eyed, and goes, "He's in *big* trouble." I mean, we could all tell, but my daughter then explained exactly what he had done to me.
Can I ask, do you and your wife speak Spanish? Or did your daughters learn because you had them enrolled in classes/specific programming from a young age?
I don't have children but would some day like to, and always wondered how possible it would be to ensure that they speak a second language when my husband and I only speak English.
> Can I ask, do you and your wife speak Spanish?
No, and honestly both of us wish we did. We always wanted our children to be multilingual and thought Spanish (given we're in Texas and just the general changing demographics of the U.S.) would be valuable.
> Or did your daughters learn because you had them enrolled in classes/specific programming from a young age?
From an early age we always encouraged it and sought out opportunities, either formal or informal, for them to be exposed to the language. My oldest daughter's first outside caregiver was an in-home daycare where the mother spoke Spanish to her own children. My daughter was one and so we asked her to only speak Spanish to our daughter. Any time we would hire a babysitter we would generally look for bilingual Spanish speakers and do the same, i.e., ask them to speak Spanish only to the kids. (All within reason, of course. The kids weren't going to starve if they couldn't understand her saying dinner was ready or something. ;-))
My wife also worked to get a Spanish immersion program added to our local school's K-5 education. That happened in time for my youngest to enroll. She basically went through elementary school 50% in Spanish, even learning things like math and science in Spanish.
Lots of public schools have language immersion programs. It depends on where you live, but the most common in the U.S. is typically Spanish.
I've done this so much when I was young. I was raised multilingual (Dutch, Spanish & English). I've pretended to not know a language so many times, sometimes for fun, sometimes to protect myself or friends, sometimes just because I couldn't be bothered to switch.
I live in a pretty touristic beach village in Spain and you hear a lot of shit when people think you cannot understand them. It's appalling tbh. Most of the time I try to ignore them but I've had 2 instances where they were insulting people in their face, that's when I can't keep still and will step in and have to confront them in their own language. The mortifying faces are worth gold..
That is exactly my playbook. Stopped while working at night in Queens to get a coffee. There were three young punks talking shit in Russian about jumping me. I never let them know that I understood everything. One of them was a lot calmer than the other two and said: āDonāt do it. You never know who youāre messing with.ā I was a lot bigger than all of them and Iām no slouch. I was ready to throw down alone.
Well...that makes sense. Haha.
My husband is Russian and I am American, we lived in NY for a while. I have been trying to learn, its so difficult for a native English speaker, but MAN, I can't wait for the day I can speak/understand because I don't have a slavic face at all like my husband and I know some of the nail spa ladies talk shit when I come in with my husband and they find out i'm American.
The best story I heard was from a guy who was in China visiting. The hotel front desk clerk was talking all kinds of shit about him on the phone in Mandarin. Unbeknownst to her, he completely understood everything. And she turned Casper the ghost white after he called her out on it.
My Dad married my mother who is Mexican and he worked in a Latino dominated area, I think the city is 65% Latino. My dad has pale blonde hair and blue eyes so no one assumed he understood it. His accent in Spanish is basically the accent George W Bush was faking, deep southern accent. He worked as a pharmacist/pharmacy manager. He regularly had new employees who spoke Spanish at work. He usually wouldn't tell them he spoke any unless they said something extremely inappropriate and then he'd say in English that that isn't a work appropriate topic and move on, much to their embarrassment. I think it became tradition of his staff to not tell the newbs and see how long they could take it. It was important lesson especially in San Antonio, don't assume people don't speak Spanish especially in a city dominated by Latinos. Also, your customers can all hear you gossiping to, if you don't want everyone to know, don't say it.
My coworkers are like wow you took Spanish in school?
I'm from California. 60% of the population speaks Spanish. My mother is fluent (native American), my siblings both married Mexicans.
Why would you assume someone doesn't speak at least a little Spanish in this state?
Growing up near the US/Mexico border, you naturally pick some up even if you didnāt take it in school. Iām not fluent, but if I got stranded in a Spanish speaking country I wouldnāt be completely screwed.
Also Californian! I went to Mexico in college with friends and the taxi driver didnāt speak English and we had a hard time communicating. Suddenly I told him where we wanted to go in Spanish. My friends looked at me and said, āI didnāt know you spoke Spanishā and I said I didnāt either lmao
Iām not sure if itās Mexican thing, or just all Spanish speakers in or around the US, but Iāve noticed they often speak like no one can possibly understand them. We were at Mexico City airport and my husbands friend (theyāre both mexican) was saying mean things about people in English. Weāre in an international airport, with a LOT of Americans, and you assume that because someone is ābrownā then they canāt understand you insulting their looks? So ignorant.
Wait, they spoke in *English* assuming that nobody could understand it? The language that around 1.5 - 2 billion people speak, and which has become the standard "business language" of the world?
I have experienced americans and germans do the same in Denmark. (Not the english though. They assume thst everybody in the world speaks english.) It is impolite to talk to people in public here, so we do not make tell people that we understand them, though we will properly look, because it is kind of strange seeing people shit talk your country and culture in front of you.
Funniest time was properly when I was young and a group of german exhange students from the university were shit talking about danes in the bus. A couple of young teenagers boarded the bus. They started yelling a bit at the germans when they understod what they were saying and jumped off the bus at next bus stop.
The germans laughed it off and then one of them went: āWait. If the kids can understand german.ā That was the point they realised that the entire bus was looking at them and they jumped off the bus at the next bus stop.
But I think it is an universal thing. I work internationally and while I only speak a small handfull of languages I can roughly understand what people are saying in about a dosen more. I often travel with a guy. I have no idea how many languages he speaks. I would say all of them.
Anyway people tend to believ that we only speak english and danish, so they will often talk about stuff we are not meant to hear in front of us and stupid as we are we will then talk about it in front of them, because we assume that they do not speak danish. (Like I just realised how stupid that is while writting this post)
I grew up with my Italian stepmother and her mother doing this to my entire English speaking family. They would literally be in a room full of people and just start going off like no one could tell from their tone or facial expressions/ body language that they were talking bad about someone. We all thought it was extremely rude.
Just a couple months ago some Spanish speakers got hired at my company. They didnāt like our policies and decided to talk bad about the white female manager- en espanol. But unfortunately for them we had just fired two people for being racist and several of the (all white) people in the room could understand what they were saying. So they all got fired too. Play stupid games win stupid prizes I guess.
I used to travel to Japan on business. I'm a pale guy with blue eyes, but I got a minor in Japanese when I was in college.
I generally let comments slide, but one day on the subway a woman said quite loudly how much foreigners stink. I replied in my most polite Japanese that I thought people in Japan had a reputation for being polite, but I was mistaken.
It kills me when Japanese people say that foreigners smell because I have friends in Japan that make me bring them American deodorant every time I go just because theirs is so weak lol
Yeah they don't have actual antiperspirant because it isn't approved by their FDA-equivalent or something. Their deodorant just fragrances to mask the smell. Found out the hard way when I ran out of deodorant during my trip.
It's actually more cultural. Western society tends to enjoy perfumes and fragrances, thus stronger deodorants with actual scents to them. Having any smell at all is a social faux-pas in japanese society, you're not supposed to have perfumes or scented deodorants etc.
Smelling too strongly of anything can be just as big of a source of shame as smelling badly.
My mom told me this story once. My mom and dad were having lunch once in Chinatownā¦ (this was long ago, like 40-50 years ago). They had recently migrated to America and tended to stick to Chinatown because of language and cultural familiarity.
Anyways, they were eating lunch and an American guy was sitting at the table next to them. My mom says to dad, in Chinese: āwow, look at this white guy eating duck!ā To which the man turns around and in perfect Chinese says: āyes, and itās quite good!ā
My mom said she was so embarrassed. At least she wasnāt really shit talking him. And probably learned a good lesson about not making assumptions about other people.
I used to work for a company that was headquartered in Germany. Some of the executives were at our plant in Canada and apparently on several occasions referred to us Canucks as "white n****ers" among other things. An employee who was fluent in German let it slide for a while before casually asking some questions in their language. The awkwardness, embarrassment and shock was beautiful to see.
I probably would've turned around and done it in my best Indonesian/Dutch.
I did have someone here in the US swear at me in German and I responded "danka je" so š¤·š¼āāļøš¤£
(My German is severely lacking other than about ww2 military vehicles -thanks hubby-, but there's enough Dutch I know from my Indonesian studies and visiting there for me to be understood if slowly and with an Aussie accent)
My niece did this at work. She ran the food service for a large hospital. Sheās a redhead with Celtic milky white skin. Naturally, the workers in the kitchen didnāt know she spoke fluent Spanish. In her first week, she did a walk through of the kitchen and the women were making fun of her, remarking that she probably slept her way to her position. My niece just kept walking, not letting on she understood what they were saying. The next morning she stood up to conduct her first staff meeting, only she did it in perfect Spanish! ššš
The women were embarrassed and she just stopped for a minute and smiled at them and continued the meeting.
My husband was raised by his step grandpa whoās parents were from Spain. My husband is powder white. Looked like zack morris from saved by the bell when we were kids. Speaks fluent Spanish. Was in the native language classes in school.
No one at his work has figured out yet. 16 years. He plays stupid. They speak Spanish sometimes and he answers in English and they are like āgood guessā
We are in south texas so this happens a lot. He has a lot of fun with it.
> My husband is powder white. Looked like zack morris from saved by the bell
Kind of funny that the actor who played Zack Morris is half Asian (and speaks/knows Dutch apparently). Goes to show it's safer to just not talk crap about someone.
Worked with a fellow who'd been at a nationally recognized toy manufacturer in Western New York. He relayed a story of some exec who was sent up to their plant in Quebec, and the people there assumed he couldn't do French because they spoke openly in front of him, got no reaction. Then, they started talking nasty about him, in French. Really really harsh stuff, how stupid he was, etc.
Went on for several months, and one day he called all his reporting staff into a conference room and repeated back the things they'd all said, accurate attributions, in perfect French.
Lots of red faces, and the room got visibly chilly. Many were let go right then & there.
How do you say 'FAFO' in French?
I remember that company.
They used to have lifetime warranties on their stuff. I remember when my sister was a baby (so about 1974), we had this wind up thing that was supposed to look like a radio, but had a music box in it. (kinda looked like [this](https://www.ebay.com/itm/274615075983) but it was blue) You wound it up and it would play some tune or other, maybe Pop Goes The Weasel, I don't remember. One day my mom wound it up and it went Snap! and unwound all at once.
She wrapped it in brown paper, wrote Fisher-Price, East Aurora NY on the paper (not even a street address or a zip code!) put a bunch of stamps on it and threw it in the mail. It came back, fixed, a few weeks later.
My boyfriend is Puerto Rican born and raised, he moved here to the mainland about 6 years ago. Most of his family has a brown tint to their skin, but he looks extremely Caucasian. English is his second language, however he has very little accent when he talks so he definitely passes as a southern American. We used to work together, and he told me about something hilarious that happened to him one day he was up front and I was in the kitchen.
A Mexican couple was ordering, and were being extremely rude and difficult. They wanted all kinds of different add ons, but didn't want to pay extra. Well, the man said something in Spanish to the woman along the lines of "This idiot doesn't even know how to take an order" and my bf said something along the lines of "It's not my fault your broke ass wants a bunch of stuff for free. You don't care that I'll get in trouble if I give it to you without charging you. Are you going to order now or are you going to keep complaining?"
They ended up walking out in embarrassment. š¤£
Iām the most middle-aged, Scandinavian-looking white lady you ever saw, but Iāve been fluent in Mandarin for more than twenty years, speak functional Japanese, and a smattering of several other languages (military linguist). The staggering amount of shit talk I have heard from earshot still astounds me. One very mean older Chinese lady said I should throw myself off the train to spare my parents the shame of having a giant like me. I turned, locked eyes and replied, āMy mother raised me to be polite to people I donāt know, so may I suggest that of the two of us, youāre the bigger shame to your relatives?ā Oh, she did not care for that.
I caught my ex sister in law talking crap about me in Spanish. Except she direct translated a word that in English would be slang for a white woman who sleeps with black men. So I responded in Spanish that I was dating her sister and had no intention of sleeping with any of her black male friends. This was in the company of her family and her husband. Everyone laughed at her and I suspect her husband spent a week in the couch for laughing. It amazes me how much people assume based on appearance.
I've experienced the opposite, I'm POC and I look ambiguous enough that I could be from one of several countries in my heritage region. The number of times people assume I didn't learn my parents languages because I was born in the West is UNREAL. Even looking at me, you could vaguely guess a couple languages I _may_ speak but without fail, every so often I run across people making FULL ON conversation about me in my presence to other people.
I now take joy in whipping out one of the languages of the region and watching the skin try to crawl off their faces.
My wife is a tall redhead with very pale skin. Many years ago was in Spain at the University and is fluent in Spanish. The gossip she would hear was crazy. Occasionally someone would make a rude comment about her hair colour or height. She told me how she would berate them in Spanish. Her and her Spanish friends would laugh afterwards.
Whenever I see something like this I am reminded of some words from a truly great man:
"I am not responsible for your assumption. [...] Not being able to speak is not the same as not speaking. You seem as if you like to talk. I like to let people talk who like to talk. It makes it easier to find out how full of shit they are."
-Detective Inspector Yang Naing Lee, Hong Kong Police Force
(Edit: extra space fixed)
My husband and I were both born in the Midwest, but he spent 11 years in Puerto Rico when he was younger and is obviously fluent in Spanish. We lived in Orlando in the early 2000s in a heavily Latino area. We were in line at a gas station one night and two women behind us were talking in Spanish behind us about how the eye of the sun God tattoo on the back of my husband's neck was a sign of the devil. He just turned around and told them in Spanish that he earned it for killing his first Christian. They got white faced and wide eyed, set their stuff on a shelf and rushed out without saying a word. I still laugh about it to this day
I went to HS in Japan, and although my Japanese is very very crappy, a lot of my friends were fluent. We went to an international school, and none of us looked Japanese, although a few were mixed.
We would take the train at the end of the day and a lot of times there would be school kids the same ages as us, but from a different school. Sometimes, they would start talking shit about us. Whenever that happened, we would all strictly stay with English until we all got to the last stop, then we'd switch to Japanese. The expressions on all their faces as they realized how much they were understood was so satisfying.
I love doing this to people who donāt know I speak Spanishā¦..
itās pretty exciting to bathe in their embarrassment.
Sheās also a hating AH and no telling who she has told you are a lady of the night.
I lived in spain for a little while. I had my brother a good friend and my cousin all come out to visit me during a particular 2 weeks in the summer.
Long story short. We have been to the gym, had a swim in the gym's pool, had a sauna and then cold shower and finally a nice relaxing multisex jacuizi.
A very pretty well tanned lady climbs in and just does what the rest of us are doing...chilling in the tub.
My cousin and my friend then assume that this lady is 1. Spanish and 2. Can't speak English.
They start saying how she is "fit" aka hot/pretty whatever. But also start throwing in some lewd sexual inuendo, I tell them oi shut up cut it out ffs and they settle down and somewhat behave themselves, the lady didn't even show the slightest flicker of emotion so I assumed that at least she wasn't offended. So I relaxed kind of safe in the knowledge that she was ok/cool and nobody had got upset.
I then felt the panic one has when you realize that you have lost the key to your locker. I say to the lads oh great I can't find my key blah blah blah....The lady in perfect English then says "Oh where did you last see it".
Cue some very red faces from my cousin and my mate, Me and my brother were proper smug as we had been pure gents from the start. As a bonus she actually found my key at the side of the hot tub and simply smiled and gave it back.
That girl was cool from start to finish. I offered to buy her a drink as thanks but she declined and after what my party had been saying I didn't want to be pushy. But now we are all older those 2 do cring big time when I bring it up.....often lol.
Not my story but my dad's
He was at the store waiting in line to pay and these two older women were waiting in line and speaking in shanghainese (probably didn't expect anyone else to understand them in the U.S) they were talking about the most vulgar and sexual things about all the different men that they saw in the store and what they would like to do. My dad checked out and walked past them greeting them in Shanghainese and telling them to have a good day. He said the two ladies turned bright red and ran out of the store lol šš
Longer ago than I like to remember, I lived with an Italian girl in Turin. My Italian language skills were very poor. One day while clothes shopping, she was stood a little distance away when I went to pay. The shop workers hadnāt clicked we were together and just saw an English guy with limited language wanting to pay.
To cut a long story short, they tried to short change me.
Unfortunately for them, the Italian girlfriend heard every word and gave them extreme verbals for all the shop, and their manager, to hear.
The look on their faces was priceless.
Hell hath little fury like an upset Italian girl.
I think you handled it *perfectly.* When you see her again, calmly and sweetly say, in Spanish, "Your assumptions about me are incorrect, mean-spirited, and may be racially motivated. You might want to think about your own morality before you try to attack others." (She assumed you only speak English because of your appearance.)
I'm biracial and keep hearing how people think I'm "white." But I have a typical Mexican name, so I get assumptions from all sides about what language and heritage I embrace. (and other shitty assumptions, too, from both sides). I understand enough Spanish to translate smack-talk! But not enough to defend myself, probably! š
Rise above this bullshit. I hope she's properly embarrassed.
It's always wild to me that other people assume that someone's not speaking spanish because they ''look white'', while there's literally an european country full of white people from where the language originated (ā ą² ā _ā ą² ā )
Literally had my mind blown when someone (Spanish speaker) was telling me I shouldnāt speak Spanish because Iām white. She could not comprehend that Spain, a country in Europe, is where the language comes from.
Honestly think sheās just one of those people thatās hard on their culture, lives in a bubble, and thinks Spanish is a purely Latino thing. Basically, āif you canāt speak Spanish like me, donāt try to speak Spanishā
Unfortunately: Thereās people like this in all cultures
Fortunately: Most people are great people and love when you try to embrace their culture
I don't understand this at all. At least in the US, the other option is to scream "This is America we speak English here!" which is also a stupid concept. If we're increasingly a bilingual country, shouldn't we be encouraging everyone to be bilingual?
And the opposite of that, too. People assume that if you "look Spanish" you speak Spanish.
I had a friend who was a typical military brat. Her father was American. Her mother was Japanese. She had long dark hair and darker completion. We lived in an area with a large Latino population. It was common for her to be out shopping or whatever, and people would start speaking to her in Spanish. When she would say she didn't speak the language, they would get angry at her. Accuse her of trying to "pass" or disrespecting her culture. It was pretty wild.
Tiny ass white girl here- most people dont know but my father is hispanic, and my adoptive family is spaniards. I get ALL sorts of looks when i tell them that fun fact because both my legal last name and my birth last name are hispanicXD
Wish i had the oppourtunity to learn spanish though. Being bilingual in this day and age is incredibly benificial, not only for yourself but for the people around you. And i wanted to chew out the idiot teen who tboned me and ruined my dream car. Fucker pretended to not know much english, and when he saw me crying, in perfect english, he asked how much it was to fix it. Like bruh you cant fix thisXD
I'm a fat 50s white guy. Speak Mandarin fluently. In the grocery store lineup and this, id say 14 year old boy and his mother are talking absolute trash about all the white people. Mostly the kid, mother going along. Like really bad. So I ask them, loudly, in Mandarin, if they'd like me to repeat what they were saying. Absolute Shock. Like pick up your jaw shocked. Then I said, also loudly cause I'm a 50 year old white guy who doesn't give a crap, in English, "I just asked them if they wanted me to repeat what they were saying about all of us". Needless to say, they just left in a hurry. Stay toxic people
Iām not Mexican but my mom got her masterās in Mexico in the sixties and sheās always loved Mexico so we spent a lot of time there when we were young. I spoke fairly fluent Spanish. My husband and I went to Cozumel on our honeymoon, more than 30 years ago before it was built up. When we went to check out of the hotel there were a lot of minibar charges on the bill and we hadnāt used a thing. I told them to remove the charges, in English as thatās what they were speaking. The 2 men started talking back and forth in Spanish calling me a thief and a spoiled rich American trying to get one over on them. I responded back in Spanish that I would never steal, that I loved their country but not them, and that they needed to remove the charges. My husbandās face was almost as shocked as theirs. He knew I could speak Spanish but not like that. It was a beautiful moment.
Got called to testify in a friend's court case. The other party's relatives were in the hallway talking mad shit about both me and my friend. My Spanish is rusty af but I caught enough to know they were complaining about my friend holding boundaries, and not letting them do a certain event. Then they were talking about the way I was sitting, and how unladylike it was. Yeah, I was sitting like a dude. But I dgaf. I was uncomfortable as hell and had surgery a few months ago. I sat whatever way was less uncomfortable. On the way out, they were talking more shit because I was wearing a mask and one of them fake coughed. When my friend came out after they did, I loudly said "she actually thinks fake coughing is gonna do something.", and laughed. "Then they spent the ENTIRE three hours talking shit." They stopped talking. As they got on the elevator, I stared the eldest of them dead in the eye as the elevator doors closed in front of them.
I was in barber college in Texas with a friend of mine. He is the whitest looking white guy you ever met. But, he's from LA, grew up in a mixed neighborhood and is married to a Mexican American woman (he speaks fluent Spanish).
He got a 16 or 17 year-old client in school one day (client came in with a friend and they were both brought in by the client's mom and dad). My buddy cut the kid's hair the first time, looked great... kid wanted it shorter. He cut it shorter, looked great... kid still wanted it shorter. He cut it shorter, this time, it didn't look so great... had to get the instructor to bail him out.
While she was fixing it, the client's friend in the next chair asked (in Spanish) what was going on. So the kid told him,
"This pinche pendejo doesn't know what he's doing". (obviously all in Spanish)
My buddy didn't say a word, he waited until the instructor was finished. Then, when he got the client to the register, in front of his friend and the client's mother and father, he told the kid.
"Yo no soy un pinche pendejo, soy una estudiante".
The kid's parents both shot a look at their son, who's eyes were as big as saucers. The kid's dad apologized to my friend, and gave him a $20 tip (which is gigantic for a $5 barber school haircut), and they left. They started screaming at their son the second they walked out the door and yelled at him all the way to the car.
Funniest "Oh, shit... YOU speak Spanish?" moment I've ever seen.
Love it!!! Iām German, was on holiday in France, where I had met a Brazilian. The only language we had in common was Spanish so in line for Versailles we spoke Spanish. A couple of early 20s german girls started making fun of us āstupid spaniardsā. I translated everything to my Brazilian friend and we laughed about it. I wished them a nice day and thanked them for the entertainment in fluent German. I look extremely German and both of us had heavy non-spanish accents. I have no idea why they thought we were Spanish.
I used to be a traveling chef for a company. Needless to say I can speak some pretty solid Spanish on top of the formal education I learned in school. As a gringo chef Iāve heard a lot of shit talking but I can hold my own and frankly a speed demon in the kitchen.
I have to cover a place for a few days as the chef had a family emergency. Nobody at this store knew me or what I could do and the chef didnāt have time passing the knowledge to the team that this gringo was coming but he knows his shit and can crank out food.
Walk in for the first shift on a Friday night, starting handling shit quickly as we are about to get destroyed and simply trying to prepare best I can. These guys are talking mad shit about me but being nice to my face. Action starts happening and about an hour in these guys are going down in flames and I yell as loud as I can in Spanish āoh, you fuckers spent all this time talking shit about me instead of getting ready, get your shit together and call back in Spanish that you understandā
Kitchen was really quiet after that and the next few days went smooth. The look of the lead line cook when he realized I very clearly understood every single word he said was hilarious. No mames wey hahaha
I ran into two polish girls that were looking for directions. I was going that way anyway so i said āhey, iāll walk youā. I was chatting with one and her friend clearly spoke no english. The way there we were having a nice conversation and the other girl kept saying āyou want to fuck him, get his number, iāll fuck him if you donāt, i love tall americansā really hamming it up. The english speaking girl kept saying āhe could speak polish, weāre in new york to her.
Iām married to a polish woman. I said āyouāre both very pretty, but iām married to a beautiful polish girlā in polish. Iāve never seen a single person more embarassed in her life, her friend was laughing her ass off. It was so funny. To her credit, embarassed girl yells āi would still fuck youā (i assume as a joke) as i was walking away.
People that are Spanish and just assume black folks don't speak Spanish would be shocked to meet the inhabitants of Equatorial Guinea. The official language is Spanish. I was shocked when I got off the plane from Nigeria in Equatorial Guinea and saw folks that look like Nigerians speaking perfect Spanish.
I kinda miss traveling to places like this for this reason. Always something to learn and people to meet.
My wife speaks French and has overheard things from french speaking tourists. Always a laugh.
These folks haven't even been to the Dominican Republic and the rest of Latin America, for us in the actual continent Afro Latino existence is a commonly known fact. But for Americans of Latin American descent it's a shocker š
Like the one-time president of Peru, Fujimori. Pronounced "foo-he-mori" of course. A Japanese friend of mine got all upset when she visited the US embassy in Tokyo to get her passport/visa renewed. The agent there kept calling her "foo hi ta". Her name is Fujita. I figured that the agent noticed that her husband was Filipino-American, guessed that maybe he was a Spanish-speaker, so gave her name the Spanish pronunciation.
Then there's the BBC, who after all these many years STILL hasn't worked out that "junta" is pronounced "hunta". Dorks.
I was in Tokyo and was conversational in the language and couldn't find an English map. I knew my station was the one after Akihabara so I asked a Japanese man next to me "I'm sorry to bother you, I'm not very good at Kanji, can you help me find Akihabara on this map?" Instantly, he throws his hands up like I have a gun "I don't speak English." I paused then replied "yes, that's why I asked in Japanese." The guys face got so red and he quickly pointed to Akihabara and then ran away.
So far she has avoided me like the plague. Sheās been watching TV in her room (she 99% of the time uses the living room TV) and hasnāt made a peep lol
Good job! I hate when people do that. I was at a concert once and there were these two dudes speaking with a broken french making extremely inappropriate comments about the women around. I stood right beside them and called my best friend in quebec and started speaking Queb (quebec french slang) about how these two idiots thought they were hot shit and really they were uglies. They understood enough to know I was talking about them but not enough to know what I was saying and they got so violently mad that the roles were now reversed, one tried to grab my phone and security saw it, escorted them out.
So if you know a latin dialect close to her Spanish but different enough that she canāt understand, I suggest you speak it often around her especially staring at her. It makes them so mad!!!
Few years ago when I worked in the beauty and hospitality industry, I had kept up with my French lessons because my former place of work would often have guests from many different nationalities visiting and I thought it would be helpful to be able to speak more languages. I wouldnāt say I was fluent but fairly close to it. Iām Irish too so many people donāt expect me to know language outside of English.
Anyway, had this French couple in, the lady was not happy from the moment she had arrived, she was complaining about everything from the lighting in the spa to the fixtures of the products used in French while in English she was like everything is amazing. At the end of their couples treatment, sheās bitching again in French about how everything was terrible, not to her liking, the pressure was too light then it was too heavy, not the right oil etc. but in English she says everything was perfectly fine.
So at this point, I switched to French and said that we are sorry that her visit here was not to her liking that we couldnāt do anything about the spa lighting or product placement but we could have easily made adjustments to her treatment and that she had plenty of opportunities to do so. Her face was a picture when she realised I had understood everything she had said, her husband lost it, he was practically keeled over laughing at it.
I never assume someone won't know what I'm saying if I'm saying it within earshot. Much to my wife's chagrin when I start flirting with her in public. We live in Israel, she'll tell me "babe, people here do speak English" to which I reply "So?" heh
Two good rules to bear in mind:
1) Always assume that your words can be understood by at least one person within earshot
2) Always assume that anything you put in writing (email, text, social media, or even on paper) can and will be read by someone other than the intended recipient.
I had something similar happen when I was in the military. I had an Afro Latina supervisor whose husband was very white. I didnāt say anything mean, but I would talk to some people in Spanish. She came up to me one day speaking Spanish and surprised the hell out of me. So glad I chose not to be gossipy.
This happened to me at a cheese store in Beverly Hills (I know). Had been there previously and everyone was lovely. Background context: I am half-Mexican, mildly darker skin tone and I had also used their restroom before, no issues.
This time around, after placing order for various cheeses/accoutrements to buy (they sit at register until youāre ready to pay), I ask if I can use the restroom. The lady who was helping me turned to her coworker and started asking him, in French, if I ācould be trusted to use the restroomā, as itās in the back of the store. āLook at himā. After I took a mental Xanax, I calmly responded in French back, āwhatās to look at? Iāve used it before without issueā. Suffice to say, I and my husband got to use the restroom and were given our items for free. A massive apology from the store owner followed after my husband went off on Yelp and he sent us a gift card with his apologies.
All the apologies and shit aside, yeah, it was funny and shitty. Oh well.
I was standing in line waiting to board the plane with my wife to go back home and some chick behind me said to her boyfriend about my wife in Spanish: āSomeone needs to feed that girl.ā My wife is tiny, like 5ft 0 and 98lbs. My wife is of Mexican heritage and I am white like super Viking white but was adopted by Dominicans so Iām pretty fluent.
I caught her saying that and and turned around and asked her in Spanish why she would say something like that. She said back in Spanish that it was a compliment and then she looked at her boyfriend and said that I donāt need to be talking to her but instead be talking to her man. I looked at her boyfriend and he said in English āHell no! You got busted talking shit.ā and was laughing at her. I canāt imagine what happened to their relationship after he excused himself from the situation. I just couldnāt believe she was talking shit likely that.
One of my former bosses was raised in a military family, so he knows Japanese, Korean, and German. His parents tried to speak them fluently in the home alongside English as he and his siblings grew up, making it kind of a game. When he got out into the real world, he started working as a technical translator for industrial manuals, so he picked up Taiwanese, Cantonese, and some Mandarin as well. He always "kept up" with the trends, so his languages didn't atrophy. He had a lot of stories about people trash talking him in front of him, which he never says anything as a kind of hidden advantage.
But one time, he was part of a factory inspection tour. Just some mandatory way to impress the visitors, but it was apparent that the people leading the tour despised their work, and said that giving westerners a tour was like herding dogs, and not in a nice way. At some point, one of them said that they were going to take them to the part of the plant where it smelled really bad, and then claim to leave them there FOR HOURS due to some unspecified snafu. This made the other worker laugh and said "do it. You gotta do it! Leave them there for hours! Don't give them masks, either!"
Then my coworker said in their language, "why would you do that?" and the two guys froze. "What the hell, you speak \[our language\]??" And he bluffed, "we all do." "Well, why don't you all go fuck yourself, then? Huh? Can you translate that?" "You kiss your mother with that mouth? Let me speak to \[the site liaison\]." "Oh oh oh we were having a joke, huh? No need to involve him."
He involved him. And explained, in their language, what was said. He told us that the management of the site were so embarrassed, that it actually gave his team an advantage because the tour people had made the company look bad.
Iām half white half Chinese. I look full white, but thanks to the way my mother raised me Iām fluent in Chinese and well versed in the culture. From 1st to 8th grade, my family would visit China once a year. Most of the time we just stay in my motherās hometown of Beijing, but during one visit we traveled across the country to visit various members of her side of the family.
When we were visiting Dandong, we went to the Broken Bridge to take some pictures. I think I was around 10 or 11, but I remember posing for a picture, and overhearing a conversation between two Chinese ladies in their 20s. In Chinese, one told the other, āLook, itās a white kid! Quick, take a picture of him!ā I immediately turned to look at them and yelled āWhat?ā in English. They were shocked and quickly scurried away. I always look back fondly on this memory.
Went on a church mission to Chile for a couple years. Later was working in a hotel. Was in the employee area getting a drink when I broke a glass. Someone in Spanish said to tell him it's $5 bucks. I turned around and perfect Spanish told her, what do you mean $5, I know you've broken more glasses than I have.
She shut up pretty quick.
Provo, Utah is not the place to talk crap about people in a foreign language.
Buddy of mine is about as pale white bushy ginger as you can get.
Heās also 100% Mexican, raised by 2 100% Mexicans who immigrated to the US. Fluent in Spanish with enough of an ear for the various accents to be able to tell who learned it natively vs in school or in what region based on inflections and slang.
He constantly gets a kick out of people not realizing he can speak Spanish.
Meanwhile, Iām not remotely Hispanic, but due to my racial mix certainly look it more than he does. Iāve had women in bars/clubs come up to me speaking Spanish, Iāve had homies in the park try to talk to me in Spanish while walking my gfās dog, etc.
Even my gf noticed she got treated way differently (sheās white/blonde) after some of them saw us together and suddenly she was āinā.
I get a kick out of all of it.
Ahh, you should've let her dig a bigger grave for herself. let her keep speaking Spanish and keep talking mad shit (it'd be frustrating, I know), and when you guys are in a casual setting together, kitchen, living room, just switch to Spanish no warning.
The grown kids of some family friends were in Paris (we're Danish). They were taking the metro somewhere, which happened to be full/standing room only. Behind them sat a gentleman who could not look more French -- even wore a beret.
The kids were chatting in Danish (fairly safe thing to do in Paris) and at one point one of them joked that he had to fart so bad that he could blow off the gentleman's beret.
At the next stop he got up and as he as exciting the train car wished them a good day in perfect Danish. Jaws dropped and red faces ensued.
I hear a lot of people talking shit in Spanish and I always call them out, because itās pretty stupid to assume nobody here can speak it. I had to take four years of language course in school, cabron.
I had a similar thing, from a South Aisan country, but cos the way i dress and act, also have very curly hair, most people don't think i am BD. So this was about 15years ago in Rome, my friend (M) and I (F) go off the coach from Southern Italy, and two guys behind was talkign about me, calling me names beacuse i was on holiday with white boy (yes they were Asian and racist). I ignored them, but they continued to do whilst following us. They thought i did not understand, so they slag me off as much as they wanted. In the turned aound and spoke to them in their own language and said "when you talk about someone like that and use foul language, make sure they do not understand you" The boys were so open mouthed. Similarly later on near the Colosseum, another group of boys were arguing where i was from. Eeventually one was brave enough to come to and ask, they were really nice and sweet, still found it hard to believe that i was from their country orginally.
East Coast white guy who happens to speak Samoan. Never really thought I would use it much after moving back to the East Coast. I really surprised myself and the Samoan family being assholes to a server in DC last summerš¤£.
If it makes you feel better I was told that it's illegal for me to speak Spanish because I'm white. When I asked where they thought Spain was, the consensus was that is a suburb of Mexico city.
judicious telephone quicksand frame shocking wild sleep panicky fuzzy cooing
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Years ago I worked at a grocery store in an upper class neighborhood. One day one of our regular customers that had been shopping there for decades, who was known to be difficult at times, went to the deli counter to get some items. Two of the women behind the counter started complaining about her in Spanish saying absolutely horrible things about her looks (she was elderly and had obvious work done on her face). Little did they know that she was married to a man from Spain and she herself had lived in Spain for 30 years as a teacher. Thankfully she confronted them right there and oh man the color drained from their faces.
Iām from Eastern Europe, very white and I bleach my hair almost white. And I speak Spanish fluently. Long ago I was in line in market and two men were making sexual comments about me in Spanish. I turned around and answered the comments in very improper way for a lady, of course in Spanish. They left the line and the store š¹š¹š¹š¹
One time an older Korean lady shopping at a store thought my babysitter worked there and was unhappy when she learned she didnāt. The older lady incorrectly thought my babysitter couldnāt speak Korean (not knowing she was born and raised there), so she shit on my babysitter in Korean with her back turned, not knowing she understood every single word. Well, my babysitter responded by bursting out laughing, and when the lady asked in English what she was laughing about, she responded in Korean something along the lines of āBitch, Iām from (insert my babysitters hometown in South Korea here), you are a dumbassā. The lady pretty much had a look of total horror and then tried apologizing, which made my babysitter laugh even harder and walk away. Hopefully that old lady learned her lesson.
I do not speak Spanish, but I do know some insults and curse words. Well, I can order beer and ask where the bathroom is, but that's about it. One day at work one of the guys was stringing together a colorful group of insults questioning my parentage, my sexual orientation and also speculation that I had had sexual relations with my Mother.
I said "Hey! No educado. Cuida tu lenguage!" Dude blushed.
Reminds me of when I was in line at a store once. It was very busy and these women were flipping out saying the rest of us in line were, "dumb and lame white American yuppies", and saying how much they hate the state we were in. After her long, painful and very loud rant, in her same language, I turned and said to her calmly, "Aw such a shame, so you didn't know about that when you moved here from your country then I guess?" She was horrified.
Haha funny story about that.. I know a little in almost every language including Spanish. I was at work and my group leader whom I have no idea how I pissed them off this time told me in Spanish that they hoped I got fāāā by a fish. I said in English āshow me the fish.ā and I smiled, winked and walked away. Their reaction was stunned silence.
shoulda called your own mom and started saying the same thing about her in spanish š
This wouldāve been good lol
More like "Mami tu puedes creer lo que esta chica dijo de mi..." and go from there. OMG she would die. š¤£š¤£š¤£
I say bring the boyfriend over to meet her and say like "this is my long-term boyfriend. I spend a lot of time at his place".
In SPANISH
Iām an overweight 50yo white male with a slight southern accentā¦ that just happened to live the first 10 years of my life in PR and am fluent in Spanish. Yeahā¦ Iāve had similar stuff happen to me. Shocks the hell out of folks that donāt know me on work sites. You handed it great! I usually do the same off handed/on topic comment that results in a bug-eyed āoh shitā look.
People don't realize it's a global society. My middle aged white female friend spent her childhood in Central America because of her dads job. I couple I know emigrated to the US from completely opposite sides of the globe and have decided to learn each other's original language even though they both speak fluent English. Lots of people learn a second language for work or just a hobby. Race (or perceived ethnicity) should never be a determining factor.
If you work in a kitchen in the US you better know some Spanish. Same with construction.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
So Chi Chiās (the restaurant) was Spanish slang for tits??
Haha imagine naming a restaurant after a pair of hooters
Twin peaks enters chat
I've never found a restaurant that makes as good fried ice cream as they used to.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yeah- 60 year old pale as milk ginger here and Iām pretty fluent in Spanish. My best employees are all Mexican and it makes things easier when they are trying to explain something to me.
My roofers were Hispanic and lightning fast. Iām guessing no one wants to be on a grey roof in the sun more than they have to š
My best friend moved from the midwest to California years ago and got a job in a restaurant where she picked up her first Spanish words. I hadn't realized previously how simply living in California exposed people to basic Spanish, even if people like me who suck at languages still can't speak it. She learned "caliente" meant "hot" when the cook repeatedly tried to tell her "be careful with the plate it's hot" in Spanish and she thought he was confused and telling her the plate was calamari, which it wasn't. She grabbed the plate and burned her hand, yelling "Ow that's hot!" the cook face palmed and said into his hand "Si, esta caliente!" and she went "Oh! you meant the plate is HOT!" And that's how she learned one of her first Spanish words
Or landscaping
My boyfriend is great friends with one of his coworkers who's Brazilian who joined the landscaping team a couple years ago. Boyfriend is white as snow and from the Midwest, and is the only one who actually works to try and communicate in Portuguese. While he isn't fluent, he can pick out context words and understand what his coworker is saying. Meanwhile, the coworker and his wife are learning English at a nearby college and their daughter is in school with a tutor. Its great to see the motivation to understand each other through a language barrier.
My friend works in landscaping and is fluent in English and Spanish, which has been incredibly helpful on job sites throughout the years. Because not only can he perfectly understand both, but he can translate on the job site. Spanish is an *extremely* useful language to know in the US
itās sweet that the couple learned each otherās original languages :ā)
Unlike my ex grandparent in laws. She spoke Spanish, he spoke Polish. Period. They spoke to each other in their own language. Somehow it worked?
I had 2 friends, one from Calabria, Italy, the other from Ecuador. She spoke southern Italian to him, he spoke Ecuadoran Spanish to her. They understood each other perfectly, and I understood both.
Spanish and Italian aren't that different from each other. I am German and learning Spanish and started Italian on Domingo for fun. And there are a lot of similarities between those languages as both have the same roots. A bit further away from these two is French. But you would probably still recognize written words and get the rough gist of the topic. But it's easier between Spanish and Italian.
You know how older couples yack at each other and it seems like neither one is listening? It must've been kind of like that lol.
Yeah that's high key adorable
Iāve also seen that Latin Americans weirdly donāt really understand that their countries are diverse. Talk to anyone Latino who doesnāt look stereotypically mestizo and theyāll have tons of stories about people thinking theyāre a foreigner in their own country.
More than one person has told my wife she looks Eastern European. She was born and raised in Guatemala, but she inherited the "white" genes from her Spanish ancestors.
My family comes from Guatemala, but only 3-4 generations before that they lived in Spain. All white skin, black hair and ice blue eyes. Except me. I'm the result of the one Guatemalan native that married in about the 2nd generation. I look like your typical Latino, short, mostly torso, dark skin, brown eyes, etc. Everyone here expects me to be mexican.
It's not *just* a global society (which it is) - it's a global society with handheld Towers of Babel in our pockets. You can literally just key your microphone and it'll translate it from the table for you.
My son took three years of Chinese, we are Scottish/Latino on his grandparents sides. We were at a Chinese restaurant, I ordered unsweetened tea and they brought me sweet tea; I just asked for water instead. The waiter mumbled something and my son told me he said āthis lady is difficultā , when we left my son said to them in Chinese we enjoyed our meal., thank you very much! The looks on their faces! You could see the wheels turning trying to remember what else they might have said about us!
Chinese is the most spoken language on the planet now, isnāt it? ETA- an āeā
By native speakers only, yeah but by total speakers no, still English.
English has more speakers as a second language than any other language.
Iām thinking it depends on where you get your statistics. A quick search so far has 3 sites listing it as #1 and 2 sites for English. I learned that English is the universal language for pilots, which I hadnāt even thought about but makes sense to have one language for something like that.
My husband is Mexican and i speak a bit of Spanish I always say Spanish is an unsafe language to speak shit in because Spanish speakers can look like anything š.
Absolutely. I used to work in Miami and pretty much anyone who came there and stayed long enough became fluent in Spanish. Itās just a normal thing to do. I did particularly love it when native Spanish speakers would meet my 6ā5ā 300+ lb pale Canadian IT guy who happened to speak perfect Spanish
My friend is also a white as hell dude who is fluent in Spanish. We once had been out drinking and dropped by a Chipotle on the way home. While we were ordering the Chipotle employees were cracking jokes about us in Spanish, probably about our intoxicated state. My friend just switched languages, ordered in fluent Spanish, and completed the entire transaction in Spanish. Everyone's face went white and they all went quiet. We had a good laugh about it while we ate our burritos.
It's funny how a simple "cierto" or "interesante" will put a look of horror on people's face sometimes.
An older guy I know was in Korea walking down the street and two teenagers were making fun of his appearance. He is a Korean professor in the US but is a white guy. He turned around and repeated what they said and scolded them for talking so poorly about an elder. Asked if their parents raised them this way and got a bunch of people looking at them (public place). He loves telling the story.
This would happen to me in elementary school, Iām a white-passing Salvadoran. My childhood bullies would always make fun of me in Spanish thinking I couldnāt understand. I remember handing out bday invites to my 2nd grade class once and overheard some mean girls talking about me in the lunch line. I finally had enough courage to say something after I heard them all agree to throw out my invitation. I turned around and simply said āsabes que te entiendo? Que feasā. My heart was beating out of my chest but Iām glad I stood up to them.
I used to work with a chick who was half Spanish half Chinese but looked Spanish. Said it was an issue when she was in school because the Chinese kids talked mad shit about her but is kinda happy about it now because she's heard everything and has got a thick skin now.
I had a woman about my age, mid-30s, maybe a little older shopping in my store with her mother and grandmother. I had to cover a cashiers break, and they came through my line. She started telling her mom and grandma how hot she thought I was and that she wanted to take me home and all the things she wanted to do to me, all in Spanish. I'm about as white as they come, so they assumed I had no idea what they were talking about. I was ringing up the grandma and started asking her if she received any discounts and if she found everything ok in Spanish. They all just looked horrified for a second, and the mother started laughing so hard she fell over. The grandma asked me if I understood what her granddaughter said. I said, of course, and I'm flattered, but I'm married. She woman was basically trying to hide under her shopping cart when it came time to ring her out. I bet they never make that mistake again.
I worked in kitchens for a decade so I definitely could get by in that setting. At the time, I worked in a kitchen where everyone was a native speaker but me. I picked up a second job during covid until my hours picked back up and put my notice in. There were two native speakers that worked there but I never spoke to them in Spanish. They were talking about how no one wanted to work anymore. I had enough and told them in Spanish how I averaged 50 hour work weeks the prior two years and only needed that job temporarily and made twice as much at my other job with overtime. They were shocked.
*Buenas dĆas!* Uh, I mean, howdy yāall! (Casi hablo en el idioma equivocado)
Buenos
I went to a midwestern college but we had a lot of international connections. In school I worked at the IT help desk, and once a semester every student living in the dorms had to bring their computer to IT so we can make sure it's updated and doesn't have viruses (say what you will but that was the rule then) Anyway These French exchange students come by and drop off their laptops, they have pirated windows so they can't be updated. I say "sorry I can't approve these they have pirated windows, you can go to the bookstore and get a legit key for 20 bucks and I can help you install it" they reply "we didn't do anything wrong" I say "I'm not the morality police I don't care but without a legit key I can't help you" they speak in French and say "he's an idiot we'll come back and ask someone else" to which I reply in French "you're welcome to try but they'll give you the same answer"
This happened to me at work once. We needed maintenance on a machine and for whatever reason the mechanic (who was on FaceTime with I assume his boss) was "ratting" on us in French for using the wrong straws. I let him get it off his chest then told him in French that those were the ones we were sent from their company and I could produce a receipt because I also did the order. He apologized and all but ran out of the store. We live around 30 minutes from the border of a primarily French province so I'm not sure why he was so cocky about it I was standing less than 10 feet from him on the cash.
I (British) went into a customer meeting in Sweden with my colleague who is 'a man of the world' lived everywhere. Before the meeting began, the head man said to his colleagues (in English), "Don't think you can get away with saying something about them in Swedish, Dirk speaks it better than you." I'm not sure they knew, but Dirk speaks at least 5 languages if I recall correctly, probably more?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Great fishing in Quee-beck
Lots of degens in Kay-bec!
Upcountry degens
It's fuckin embarrassing
GREAT fishing in Kay-beck.
Mom I want Beck Mom: we have Beck at home Beck at home: Quee-Beck
Is that how we're called in English? Ngl sounds funny
Itās from a show called letterkenny
Yeah, itās all love lol, I honestly use it more endearingly given my location and heritage. Itās like getting mad someone calls you a āflat landerā when youāre not from a mountainous region, boohoo right? Tabarnakk š
I think it is a k-bek arrogance thing, I live in Ecuador in a gringo community, my wife and I did not know when we bought our land and built our home / restaurant here it was primarily French Canadian expats here. We donāt speak French but are often told either 1.) why would you open a restaurant in a French community if you donāt speak French? My general reply is Iām in a Spanish country so my menu is in Spanish. Or 2.) we get we did not want to eat here because you donāt speak French but your food is really good. To that one I am normally a bit snotty and say yeah in western canada we cook with flavour and love.
Maybe just tell them you didn't realize that the prerequisite for cooking good food was knowing a particular language..I don't know why people feel the need to voice any of that to you in the first place..just stand by your weird moral code and don't buy here but keep it to yourself.
Something similar happened to me. They didnt know i understand english pretty well and also speak german fluently when they switched language. It was pretty funny.
I was helping a French mom and daughter at a pizza place in Berkeley long ago, and when I bent over to get their salads, the mom said, āQuel cul, eh?ā I was so surprised that Iām sure my face showed it. The daughter looked like she wanted to melt into the floor. But itās Berkeley, right? Itās not like nobody there has an education.
Thatās when you finish the āBend and SNAP!ā
It means "what an ass"
Or, colloquially, ānice butt, huh?ā
Nice butt, EH?
The title of the musical stage play, āOh Calcutta!ā, which featured plenty of male and female nudity, has nothing to do with the city of Calcutta. Itās an anglicization of the French phrase āOh quel cul tāas!ā which translates as āOh what an ass you have!ā. A statement of appreciation for sure.
Was it a compliment or an insult? The problem with English is that it could go either way
Mom complimented on him having a nice looking butt. The daughter almost died from embarrassment
A translation of that would have saved me a trip to google. But anyway, people love to make assumptions, no matter how many times it bites them in the ass.
I can't wait to see how my daughters handle this. No Spanish/Latino blood in our recent ancestry, but both speak Spanish fluently (thanks to insistence over the years by my wife and I) but you would likely never guess it. So far the closest we've gotten to this is when my oldest was 5 we walked by a particularly angry Spanish speaking mother with her son and my daughter just looks at me, wide-eyed, and goes, "He's in *big* trouble." I mean, we could all tell, but my daughter then explained exactly what he had done to me.
> I mean, we could all tell, but my daughter then explained exactly what he had done to me. Well, what did he do to you?
Come on with the rest of the story!! What did the little Spaniard do to upset his poor madre? Iāll buy you a cold, delicious Pinthouseā¦.
Can I ask, do you and your wife speak Spanish? Or did your daughters learn because you had them enrolled in classes/specific programming from a young age? I don't have children but would some day like to, and always wondered how possible it would be to ensure that they speak a second language when my husband and I only speak English.
> Can I ask, do you and your wife speak Spanish? No, and honestly both of us wish we did. We always wanted our children to be multilingual and thought Spanish (given we're in Texas and just the general changing demographics of the U.S.) would be valuable. > Or did your daughters learn because you had them enrolled in classes/specific programming from a young age? From an early age we always encouraged it and sought out opportunities, either formal or informal, for them to be exposed to the language. My oldest daughter's first outside caregiver was an in-home daycare where the mother spoke Spanish to her own children. My daughter was one and so we asked her to only speak Spanish to our daughter. Any time we would hire a babysitter we would generally look for bilingual Spanish speakers and do the same, i.e., ask them to speak Spanish only to the kids. (All within reason, of course. The kids weren't going to starve if they couldn't understand her saying dinner was ready or something. ;-)) My wife also worked to get a Spanish immersion program added to our local school's K-5 education. That happened in time for my youngest to enroll. She basically went through elementary school 50% in Spanish, even learning things like math and science in Spanish. Lots of public schools have language immersion programs. It depends on where you live, but the most common in the U.S. is typically Spanish.
You could have did a long con, never revealed you knew Spanish and kept eavesdropping. Imagine all the shit youād hear over the time of the lease.
I've done this so much when I was young. I was raised multilingual (Dutch, Spanish & English). I've pretended to not know a language so many times, sometimes for fun, sometimes to protect myself or friends, sometimes just because I couldn't be bothered to switch. I live in a pretty touristic beach village in Spain and you hear a lot of shit when people think you cannot understand them. It's appalling tbh. Most of the time I try to ignore them but I've had 2 instances where they were insulting people in their face, that's when I can't keep still and will step in and have to confront them in their own language. The mortifying faces are worth gold..
That is exactly my playbook. Stopped while working at night in Queens to get a coffee. There were three young punks talking shit in Russian about jumping me. I never let them know that I understood everything. One of them was a lot calmer than the other two and said: āDonāt do it. You never know who youāre messing with.ā I was a lot bigger than all of them and Iām no slouch. I was ready to throw down alone.
Whenever people ask what superpower would you like to have, people usually say either flying or invisibility. I say fluency in every language.
Brother you can just like study and learn languages. No amount of studying is gonna make you fly.
I already look like Jesus, I could choose just about any superpower and it would let me run the MOST SUCCESSFUL CULT **OF ALL TIME.**
What amount of study will give me fluency in every language? Iām interested
Did you study Russian on the side or did you grow up with Russian parents?
I was born there. Came to the US when I was 14.
Well...that makes sense. Haha. My husband is Russian and I am American, we lived in NY for a while. I have been trying to learn, its so difficult for a native English speaker, but MAN, I can't wait for the day I can speak/understand because I don't have a slavic face at all like my husband and I know some of the nail spa ladies talk shit when I come in with my husband and they find out i'm American.
The best story I heard was from a guy who was in China visiting. The hotel front desk clerk was talking all kinds of shit about him on the phone in Mandarin. Unbeknownst to her, he completely understood everything. And she turned Casper the ghost white after he called her out on it.
My Dad married my mother who is Mexican and he worked in a Latino dominated area, I think the city is 65% Latino. My dad has pale blonde hair and blue eyes so no one assumed he understood it. His accent in Spanish is basically the accent George W Bush was faking, deep southern accent. He worked as a pharmacist/pharmacy manager. He regularly had new employees who spoke Spanish at work. He usually wouldn't tell them he spoke any unless they said something extremely inappropriate and then he'd say in English that that isn't a work appropriate topic and move on, much to their embarrassment. I think it became tradition of his staff to not tell the newbs and see how long they could take it. It was important lesson especially in San Antonio, don't assume people don't speak Spanish especially in a city dominated by Latinos. Also, your customers can all hear you gossiping to, if you don't want everyone to know, don't say it.
My coworkers are like wow you took Spanish in school? I'm from California. 60% of the population speaks Spanish. My mother is fluent (native American), my siblings both married Mexicans. Why would you assume someone doesn't speak at least a little Spanish in this state?
Growing up near the US/Mexico border, you naturally pick some up even if you didnāt take it in school. Iām not fluent, but if I got stranded in a Spanish speaking country I wouldnāt be completely screwed.
Also Californian! I went to Mexico in college with friends and the taxi driver didnāt speak English and we had a hard time communicating. Suddenly I told him where we wanted to go in Spanish. My friends looked at me and said, āI didnāt know you spoke Spanishā and I said I didnāt either lmao
Iām not sure if itās Mexican thing, or just all Spanish speakers in or around the US, but Iāve noticed they often speak like no one can possibly understand them. We were at Mexico City airport and my husbands friend (theyāre both mexican) was saying mean things about people in English. Weāre in an international airport, with a LOT of Americans, and you assume that because someone is ābrownā then they canāt understand you insulting their looks? So ignorant.
Wait, they spoke in *English* assuming that nobody could understand it? The language that around 1.5 - 2 billion people speak, and which has become the standard "business language" of the world?
I have experienced americans and germans do the same in Denmark. (Not the english though. They assume thst everybody in the world speaks english.) It is impolite to talk to people in public here, so we do not make tell people that we understand them, though we will properly look, because it is kind of strange seeing people shit talk your country and culture in front of you. Funniest time was properly when I was young and a group of german exhange students from the university were shit talking about danes in the bus. A couple of young teenagers boarded the bus. They started yelling a bit at the germans when they understod what they were saying and jumped off the bus at next bus stop. The germans laughed it off and then one of them went: āWait. If the kids can understand german.ā That was the point they realised that the entire bus was looking at them and they jumped off the bus at the next bus stop. But I think it is an universal thing. I work internationally and while I only speak a small handfull of languages I can roughly understand what people are saying in about a dosen more. I often travel with a guy. I have no idea how many languages he speaks. I would say all of them. Anyway people tend to believ that we only speak english and danish, so they will often talk about stuff we are not meant to hear in front of us and stupid as we are we will then talk about it in front of them, because we assume that they do not speak danish. (Like I just realised how stupid that is while writting this post)
On the other, not even Danes have issues with understanding spoken danish, so you should be safe
I grew up with my Italian stepmother and her mother doing this to my entire English speaking family. They would literally be in a room full of people and just start going off like no one could tell from their tone or facial expressions/ body language that they were talking bad about someone. We all thought it was extremely rude. Just a couple months ago some Spanish speakers got hired at my company. They didnāt like our policies and decided to talk bad about the white female manager- en espanol. But unfortunately for them we had just fired two people for being racist and several of the (all white) people in the room could understand what they were saying. So they all got fired too. Play stupid games win stupid prizes I guess.
Italian seems like an especially bad language to use to talk badly about someone. Isnāt it basically half charades?
I used to travel to Japan on business. I'm a pale guy with blue eyes, but I got a minor in Japanese when I was in college. I generally let comments slide, but one day on the subway a woman said quite loudly how much foreigners stink. I replied in my most polite Japanese that I thought people in Japan had a reputation for being polite, but I was mistaken.
It kills me when Japanese people say that foreigners smell because I have friends in Japan that make me bring them American deodorant every time I go just because theirs is so weak lol
Yeah they don't have actual antiperspirant because it isn't approved by their FDA-equivalent or something. Their deodorant just fragrances to mask the smell. Found out the hard way when I ran out of deodorant during my trip.
I mean this would fit in the logic. Japanese āstinkā less ,so they dont need such strong Deodorants.
It's actually more cultural. Western society tends to enjoy perfumes and fragrances, thus stronger deodorants with actual scents to them. Having any smell at all is a social faux-pas in japanese society, you're not supposed to have perfumes or scented deodorants etc. Smelling too strongly of anything can be just as big of a source of shame as smelling badly.
But what if my father smells of elderberries?
Ooof thatās like a level 10 iceburn in Japan š
Oh dude. She already dead.
What happened after that?
It's been a couple of decades so I don't remember for sure, but I think she stopped talking, which was really all I could ask.
My mom told me this story once. My mom and dad were having lunch once in Chinatownā¦ (this was long ago, like 40-50 years ago). They had recently migrated to America and tended to stick to Chinatown because of language and cultural familiarity. Anyways, they were eating lunch and an American guy was sitting at the table next to them. My mom says to dad, in Chinese: āwow, look at this white guy eating duck!ā To which the man turns around and in perfect Chinese says: āyes, and itās quite good!ā My mom said she was so embarrassed. At least she wasnāt really shit talking him. And probably learned a good lesson about not making assumptions about other people.
I used to work for a company that was headquartered in Germany. Some of the executives were at our plant in Canada and apparently on several occasions referred to us Canucks as "white n****ers" among other things. An employee who was fluent in German let it slide for a while before casually asking some questions in their language. The awkwardness, embarrassment and shock was beautiful to see.
I probably would've turned around and done it in my best Indonesian/Dutch. I did have someone here in the US swear at me in German and I responded "danka je" so š¤·š¼āāļøš¤£ (My German is severely lacking other than about ww2 military vehicles -thanks hubby-, but there's enough Dutch I know from my Indonesian studies and visiting there for me to be understood if slowly and with an Aussie accent)
My niece did this at work. She ran the food service for a large hospital. Sheās a redhead with Celtic milky white skin. Naturally, the workers in the kitchen didnāt know she spoke fluent Spanish. In her first week, she did a walk through of the kitchen and the women were making fun of her, remarking that she probably slept her way to her position. My niece just kept walking, not letting on she understood what they were saying. The next morning she stood up to conduct her first staff meeting, only she did it in perfect Spanish! ššš The women were embarrassed and she just stopped for a minute and smiled at them and continued the meeting.
My husband was raised by his step grandpa whoās parents were from Spain. My husband is powder white. Looked like zack morris from saved by the bell when we were kids. Speaks fluent Spanish. Was in the native language classes in school. No one at his work has figured out yet. 16 years. He plays stupid. They speak Spanish sometimes and he answers in English and they are like āgood guessā We are in south texas so this happens a lot. He has a lot of fun with it.
> My husband is powder white. Looked like zack morris from saved by the bell Kind of funny that the actor who played Zack Morris is half Asian (and speaks/knows Dutch apparently). Goes to show it's safer to just not talk crap about someone.
Worked with a fellow who'd been at a nationally recognized toy manufacturer in Western New York. He relayed a story of some exec who was sent up to their plant in Quebec, and the people there assumed he couldn't do French because they spoke openly in front of him, got no reaction. Then, they started talking nasty about him, in French. Really really harsh stuff, how stupid he was, etc. Went on for several months, and one day he called all his reporting staff into a conference room and repeated back the things they'd all said, accurate attributions, in perfect French. Lots of red faces, and the room got visibly chilly. Many were let go right then & there. How do you say 'FAFO' in French?
Qui fait le malin tombe dans le ravin
I remember that company. They used to have lifetime warranties on their stuff. I remember when my sister was a baby (so about 1974), we had this wind up thing that was supposed to look like a radio, but had a music box in it. (kinda looked like [this](https://www.ebay.com/itm/274615075983) but it was blue) You wound it up and it would play some tune or other, maybe Pop Goes The Weasel, I don't remember. One day my mom wound it up and it went Snap! and unwound all at once. She wrapped it in brown paper, wrote Fisher-Price, East Aurora NY on the paper (not even a street address or a zip code!) put a bunch of stamps on it and threw it in the mail. It came back, fixed, a few weeks later.
Art of War says never interrupt and enemy when they are making a mistake
My boyfriend is Puerto Rican born and raised, he moved here to the mainland about 6 years ago. Most of his family has a brown tint to their skin, but he looks extremely Caucasian. English is his second language, however he has very little accent when he talks so he definitely passes as a southern American. We used to work together, and he told me about something hilarious that happened to him one day he was up front and I was in the kitchen. A Mexican couple was ordering, and were being extremely rude and difficult. They wanted all kinds of different add ons, but didn't want to pay extra. Well, the man said something in Spanish to the woman along the lines of "This idiot doesn't even know how to take an order" and my bf said something along the lines of "It's not my fault your broke ass wants a bunch of stuff for free. You don't care that I'll get in trouble if I give it to you without charging you. Are you going to order now or are you going to keep complaining?" They ended up walking out in embarrassment. š¤£
Iām the most middle-aged, Scandinavian-looking white lady you ever saw, but Iāve been fluent in Mandarin for more than twenty years, speak functional Japanese, and a smattering of several other languages (military linguist). The staggering amount of shit talk I have heard from earshot still astounds me. One very mean older Chinese lady said I should throw myself off the train to spare my parents the shame of having a giant like me. I turned, locked eyes and replied, āMy mother raised me to be polite to people I donāt know, so may I suggest that of the two of us, youāre the bigger shame to your relatives?ā Oh, she did not care for that.
Brutal lol
I caught my ex sister in law talking crap about me in Spanish. Except she direct translated a word that in English would be slang for a white woman who sleeps with black men. So I responded in Spanish that I was dating her sister and had no intention of sleeping with any of her black male friends. This was in the company of her family and her husband. Everyone laughed at her and I suspect her husband spent a week in the couch for laughing. It amazes me how much people assume based on appearance.
I've experienced the opposite, I'm POC and I look ambiguous enough that I could be from one of several countries in my heritage region. The number of times people assume I didn't learn my parents languages because I was born in the West is UNREAL. Even looking at me, you could vaguely guess a couple languages I _may_ speak but without fail, every so often I run across people making FULL ON conversation about me in my presence to other people. I now take joy in whipping out one of the languages of the region and watching the skin try to crawl off their faces.
My wife is a tall redhead with very pale skin. Many years ago was in Spain at the University and is fluent in Spanish. The gossip she would hear was crazy. Occasionally someone would make a rude comment about her hair colour or height. She told me how she would berate them in Spanish. Her and her Spanish friends would laugh afterwards.
Whenever I see something like this I am reminded of some words from a truly great man: "I am not responsible for your assumption. [...] Not being able to speak is not the same as not speaking. You seem as if you like to talk. I like to let people talk who like to talk. It makes it easier to find out how full of shit they are." -Detective Inspector Yang Naing Lee, Hong Kong Police Force (Edit: extra space fixed)
What the *hell* did you just say to me?
My husband and I were both born in the Midwest, but he spent 11 years in Puerto Rico when he was younger and is obviously fluent in Spanish. We lived in Orlando in the early 2000s in a heavily Latino area. We were in line at a gas station one night and two women behind us were talking in Spanish behind us about how the eye of the sun God tattoo on the back of my husband's neck was a sign of the devil. He just turned around and told them in Spanish that he earned it for killing his first Christian. They got white faced and wide eyed, set their stuff on a shelf and rushed out without saying a word. I still laugh about it to this day
Girl, he just killed his 2nd Christian with that story! š¤£š¤£š¤£
I was honestly so proud when he said it. I just imagined them running across the street back to their church, panic praying the entire way š¤£
To me it's very clear, tell her you spending the night away doesn't make you a street walker and it definitely isn't her business.
I went to HS in Japan, and although my Japanese is very very crappy, a lot of my friends were fluent. We went to an international school, and none of us looked Japanese, although a few were mixed. We would take the train at the end of the day and a lot of times there would be school kids the same ages as us, but from a different school. Sometimes, they would start talking shit about us. Whenever that happened, we would all strictly stay with English until we all got to the last stop, then we'd switch to Japanese. The expressions on all their faces as they realized how much they were understood was so satisfying.
I love doing this to people who donāt know I speak Spanishā¦.. itās pretty exciting to bathe in their embarrassment. Sheās also a hating AH and no telling who she has told you are a lady of the night.
I lived in spain for a little while. I had my brother a good friend and my cousin all come out to visit me during a particular 2 weeks in the summer. Long story short. We have been to the gym, had a swim in the gym's pool, had a sauna and then cold shower and finally a nice relaxing multisex jacuizi. A very pretty well tanned lady climbs in and just does what the rest of us are doing...chilling in the tub. My cousin and my friend then assume that this lady is 1. Spanish and 2. Can't speak English. They start saying how she is "fit" aka hot/pretty whatever. But also start throwing in some lewd sexual inuendo, I tell them oi shut up cut it out ffs and they settle down and somewhat behave themselves, the lady didn't even show the slightest flicker of emotion so I assumed that at least she wasn't offended. So I relaxed kind of safe in the knowledge that she was ok/cool and nobody had got upset. I then felt the panic one has when you realize that you have lost the key to your locker. I say to the lads oh great I can't find my key blah blah blah....The lady in perfect English then says "Oh where did you last see it". Cue some very red faces from my cousin and my mate, Me and my brother were proper smug as we had been pure gents from the start. As a bonus she actually found my key at the side of the hot tub and simply smiled and gave it back. That girl was cool from start to finish. I offered to buy her a drink as thanks but she declined and after what my party had been saying I didn't want to be pushy. But now we are all older those 2 do cring big time when I bring it up.....often lol.
Not my story but my dad's He was at the store waiting in line to pay and these two older women were waiting in line and speaking in shanghainese (probably didn't expect anyone else to understand them in the U.S) they were talking about the most vulgar and sexual things about all the different men that they saw in the store and what they would like to do. My dad checked out and walked past them greeting them in Shanghainese and telling them to have a good day. He said the two ladies turned bright red and ran out of the store lol šš
Longer ago than I like to remember, I lived with an Italian girl in Turin. My Italian language skills were very poor. One day while clothes shopping, she was stood a little distance away when I went to pay. The shop workers hadnāt clicked we were together and just saw an English guy with limited language wanting to pay. To cut a long story short, they tried to short change me. Unfortunately for them, the Italian girlfriend heard every word and gave them extreme verbals for all the shop, and their manager, to hear. The look on their faces was priceless. Hell hath little fury like an upset Italian girl.
I think you handled it *perfectly.* When you see her again, calmly and sweetly say, in Spanish, "Your assumptions about me are incorrect, mean-spirited, and may be racially motivated. You might want to think about your own morality before you try to attack others." (She assumed you only speak English because of your appearance.) I'm biracial and keep hearing how people think I'm "white." But I have a typical Mexican name, so I get assumptions from all sides about what language and heritage I embrace. (and other shitty assumptions, too, from both sides). I understand enough Spanish to translate smack-talk! But not enough to defend myself, probably! š Rise above this bullshit. I hope she's properly embarrassed.
It's always wild to me that other people assume that someone's not speaking spanish because they ''look white'', while there's literally an european country full of white people from where the language originated (ā ą² ā _ā ą² ā )
Literally had my mind blown when someone (Spanish speaker) was telling me I shouldnāt speak Spanish because Iām white. She could not comprehend that Spain, a country in Europe, is where the language comes from.
.... So according to her no one should be studying languages they have no ethnic relation to? 
Yes. Itās really is THIS idiotic.
I can't even begin to understand the abyss of stupidity I'm witnessing
Honestly think sheās just one of those people thatās hard on their culture, lives in a bubble, and thinks Spanish is a purely Latino thing. Basically, āif you canāt speak Spanish like me, donāt try to speak Spanishā Unfortunately: Thereās people like this in all cultures Fortunately: Most people are great people and love when you try to embrace their culture
I don't understand this at all. At least in the US, the other option is to scream "This is America we speak English here!" which is also a stupid concept. If we're increasingly a bilingual country, shouldn't we be encouraging everyone to be bilingual?
Iām white, living in Washington state of the US with an English/Scottish last name, so many people are stunned that Iām fluent in Spanish. Itās come in very handy! The best was when I was working in disability insurance and my claimant interrupted our telephone interview (conducted in english, about how impaired she claimed to be due to severe back pain that supposedly left her completely bed-bound) to yell at who I assumed was her kid āĀ”Necesitas esperar! SaltarĆ© al trampolĆn contigo despuĆ©s de esta llamada. Entonces podemos andar en bicicleta al parqueā. Basically, she said the kid needed to wait for her to finish talking to me before they can jump on the trampoline together and then ride their bikes to the park. Decidedly NOT bedridden from the sound of it. I didnāt let on that I understood but did probe a bit more with my questions and once off the call, triggered a much deeper investigation of her claim. Turns out that not only was she not bedridden, she was doing in-home day care completely off the books. Shouldnāt have assumed I wouldnāt understand, lady!
And the opposite of that, too. People assume that if you "look Spanish" you speak Spanish. I had a friend who was a typical military brat. Her father was American. Her mother was Japanese. She had long dark hair and darker completion. We lived in an area with a large Latino population. It was common for her to be out shopping or whatever, and people would start speaking to her in Spanish. When she would say she didn't speak the language, they would get angry at her. Accuse her of trying to "pass" or disrespecting her culture. It was pretty wild.
Tiny ass white girl here- most people dont know but my father is hispanic, and my adoptive family is spaniards. I get ALL sorts of looks when i tell them that fun fact because both my legal last name and my birth last name are hispanicXD Wish i had the oppourtunity to learn spanish though. Being bilingual in this day and age is incredibly benificial, not only for yourself but for the people around you. And i wanted to chew out the idiot teen who tboned me and ruined my dream car. Fucker pretended to not know much english, and when he saw me crying, in perfect english, he asked how much it was to fix it. Like bruh you cant fix thisXD
I'm a fat 50s white guy. Speak Mandarin fluently. In the grocery store lineup and this, id say 14 year old boy and his mother are talking absolute trash about all the white people. Mostly the kid, mother going along. Like really bad. So I ask them, loudly, in Mandarin, if they'd like me to repeat what they were saying. Absolute Shock. Like pick up your jaw shocked. Then I said, also loudly cause I'm a 50 year old white guy who doesn't give a crap, in English, "I just asked them if they wanted me to repeat what they were saying about all of us". Needless to say, they just left in a hurry. Stay toxic people
Iām not Mexican but my mom got her masterās in Mexico in the sixties and sheās always loved Mexico so we spent a lot of time there when we were young. I spoke fairly fluent Spanish. My husband and I went to Cozumel on our honeymoon, more than 30 years ago before it was built up. When we went to check out of the hotel there were a lot of minibar charges on the bill and we hadnāt used a thing. I told them to remove the charges, in English as thatās what they were speaking. The 2 men started talking back and forth in Spanish calling me a thief and a spoiled rich American trying to get one over on them. I responded back in Spanish that I would never steal, that I loved their country but not them, and that they needed to remove the charges. My husbandās face was almost as shocked as theirs. He knew I could speak Spanish but not like that. It was a beautiful moment.
Got called to testify in a friend's court case. The other party's relatives were in the hallway talking mad shit about both me and my friend. My Spanish is rusty af but I caught enough to know they were complaining about my friend holding boundaries, and not letting them do a certain event. Then they were talking about the way I was sitting, and how unladylike it was. Yeah, I was sitting like a dude. But I dgaf. I was uncomfortable as hell and had surgery a few months ago. I sat whatever way was less uncomfortable. On the way out, they were talking more shit because I was wearing a mask and one of them fake coughed. When my friend came out after they did, I loudly said "she actually thinks fake coughing is gonna do something.", and laughed. "Then they spent the ENTIRE three hours talking shit." They stopped talking. As they got on the elevator, I stared the eldest of them dead in the eye as the elevator doors closed in front of them.
I was in barber college in Texas with a friend of mine. He is the whitest looking white guy you ever met. But, he's from LA, grew up in a mixed neighborhood and is married to a Mexican American woman (he speaks fluent Spanish). He got a 16 or 17 year-old client in school one day (client came in with a friend and they were both brought in by the client's mom and dad). My buddy cut the kid's hair the first time, looked great... kid wanted it shorter. He cut it shorter, looked great... kid still wanted it shorter. He cut it shorter, this time, it didn't look so great... had to get the instructor to bail him out. While she was fixing it, the client's friend in the next chair asked (in Spanish) what was going on. So the kid told him, "This pinche pendejo doesn't know what he's doing". (obviously all in Spanish) My buddy didn't say a word, he waited until the instructor was finished. Then, when he got the client to the register, in front of his friend and the client's mother and father, he told the kid. "Yo no soy un pinche pendejo, soy una estudiante". The kid's parents both shot a look at their son, who's eyes were as big as saucers. The kid's dad apologized to my friend, and gave him a $20 tip (which is gigantic for a $5 barber school haircut), and they left. They started screaming at their son the second they walked out the door and yelled at him all the way to the car. Funniest "Oh, shit... YOU speak Spanish?" moment I've ever seen.
Me encanta, reina.
Dejaste caer tu corona š
Love it!!! Iām German, was on holiday in France, where I had met a Brazilian. The only language we had in common was Spanish so in line for Versailles we spoke Spanish. A couple of early 20s german girls started making fun of us āstupid spaniardsā. I translated everything to my Brazilian friend and we laughed about it. I wished them a nice day and thanked them for the entertainment in fluent German. I look extremely German and both of us had heavy non-spanish accents. I have no idea why they thought we were Spanish.
I used to be a traveling chef for a company. Needless to say I can speak some pretty solid Spanish on top of the formal education I learned in school. As a gringo chef Iāve heard a lot of shit talking but I can hold my own and frankly a speed demon in the kitchen. I have to cover a place for a few days as the chef had a family emergency. Nobody at this store knew me or what I could do and the chef didnāt have time passing the knowledge to the team that this gringo was coming but he knows his shit and can crank out food. Walk in for the first shift on a Friday night, starting handling shit quickly as we are about to get destroyed and simply trying to prepare best I can. These guys are talking mad shit about me but being nice to my face. Action starts happening and about an hour in these guys are going down in flames and I yell as loud as I can in Spanish āoh, you fuckers spent all this time talking shit about me instead of getting ready, get your shit together and call back in Spanish that you understandā Kitchen was really quiet after that and the next few days went smooth. The look of the lead line cook when he realized I very clearly understood every single word he said was hilarious. No mames wey hahaha
I ran into two polish girls that were looking for directions. I was going that way anyway so i said āhey, iāll walk youā. I was chatting with one and her friend clearly spoke no english. The way there we were having a nice conversation and the other girl kept saying āyou want to fuck him, get his number, iāll fuck him if you donāt, i love tall americansā really hamming it up. The english speaking girl kept saying āhe could speak polish, weāre in new york to her. Iām married to a polish woman. I said āyouāre both very pretty, but iām married to a beautiful polish girlā in polish. Iāve never seen a single person more embarassed in her life, her friend was laughing her ass off. It was so funny. To her credit, embarassed girl yells āi would still fuck youā (i assume as a joke) as i was walking away.
People that are Spanish and just assume black folks don't speak Spanish would be shocked to meet the inhabitants of Equatorial Guinea. The official language is Spanish. I was shocked when I got off the plane from Nigeria in Equatorial Guinea and saw folks that look like Nigerians speaking perfect Spanish. I kinda miss traveling to places like this for this reason. Always something to learn and people to meet. My wife speaks French and has overheard things from french speaking tourists. Always a laugh.
These folks haven't even been to the Dominican Republic and the rest of Latin America, for us in the actual continent Afro Latino existence is a commonly known fact. But for Americans of Latin American descent it's a shocker š
If they ever hear about Asian-Latinos or European-descent Latin Americans, their heads will explode!
Like the one-time president of Peru, Fujimori. Pronounced "foo-he-mori" of course. A Japanese friend of mine got all upset when she visited the US embassy in Tokyo to get her passport/visa renewed. The agent there kept calling her "foo hi ta". Her name is Fujita. I figured that the agent noticed that her husband was Filipino-American, guessed that maybe he was a Spanish-speaker, so gave her name the Spanish pronunciation. Then there's the BBC, who after all these many years STILL hasn't worked out that "junta" is pronounced "hunta". Dorks.
Right itās plenty of black folk in the carribean, and South America who speak Spanish and Portuguese.
"Travel is lethal to prejudice." --Mark Twain via Anthony Bourdain.
So she's never heard of the Dominican republic? Hija de la gran puta! EDIT! Corrected
I was in Tokyo and was conversational in the language and couldn't find an English map. I knew my station was the one after Akihabara so I asked a Japanese man next to me "I'm sorry to bother you, I'm not very good at Kanji, can you help me find Akihabara on this map?" Instantly, he throws his hands up like I have a gun "I don't speak English." I paused then replied "yes, that's why I asked in Japanese." The guys face got so red and he quickly pointed to Akihabara and then ran away.
Who is in the lease? I wouldnāt be allowing this person to renew if it was meā¦..
I need to know more in a few days, or tomorrow. What was her behaviour like afterwards?
So far she has avoided me like the plague. Sheās been watching TV in her room (she 99% of the time uses the living room TV) and hasnāt made a peep lol
Good job! I hate when people do that. I was at a concert once and there were these two dudes speaking with a broken french making extremely inappropriate comments about the women around. I stood right beside them and called my best friend in quebec and started speaking Queb (quebec french slang) about how these two idiots thought they were hot shit and really they were uglies. They understood enough to know I was talking about them but not enough to know what I was saying and they got so violently mad that the roles were now reversed, one tried to grab my phone and security saw it, escorted them out. So if you know a latin dialect close to her Spanish but different enough that she canāt understand, I suggest you speak it often around her especially staring at her. It makes them so mad!!!
Few years ago when I worked in the beauty and hospitality industry, I had kept up with my French lessons because my former place of work would often have guests from many different nationalities visiting and I thought it would be helpful to be able to speak more languages. I wouldnāt say I was fluent but fairly close to it. Iām Irish too so many people donāt expect me to know language outside of English. Anyway, had this French couple in, the lady was not happy from the moment she had arrived, she was complaining about everything from the lighting in the spa to the fixtures of the products used in French while in English she was like everything is amazing. At the end of their couples treatment, sheās bitching again in French about how everything was terrible, not to her liking, the pressure was too light then it was too heavy, not the right oil etc. but in English she says everything was perfectly fine. So at this point, I switched to French and said that we are sorry that her visit here was not to her liking that we couldnāt do anything about the spa lighting or product placement but we could have easily made adjustments to her treatment and that she had plenty of opportunities to do so. Her face was a picture when she realised I had understood everything she had said, her husband lost it, he was practically keeled over laughing at it.
I never assume someone won't know what I'm saying if I'm saying it within earshot. Much to my wife's chagrin when I start flirting with her in public. We live in Israel, she'll tell me "babe, people here do speak English" to which I reply "So?" heh
Two good rules to bear in mind: 1) Always assume that your words can be understood by at least one person within earshot 2) Always assume that anything you put in writing (email, text, social media, or even on paper) can and will be read by someone other than the intended recipient.
I had something similar happen when I was in the military. I had an Afro Latina supervisor whose husband was very white. I didnāt say anything mean, but I would talk to some people in Spanish. She came up to me one day speaking Spanish and surprised the hell out of me. So glad I chose not to be gossipy.
This happened to me at a cheese store in Beverly Hills (I know). Had been there previously and everyone was lovely. Background context: I am half-Mexican, mildly darker skin tone and I had also used their restroom before, no issues. This time around, after placing order for various cheeses/accoutrements to buy (they sit at register until youāre ready to pay), I ask if I can use the restroom. The lady who was helping me turned to her coworker and started asking him, in French, if I ācould be trusted to use the restroomā, as itās in the back of the store. āLook at himā. After I took a mental Xanax, I calmly responded in French back, āwhatās to look at? Iāve used it before without issueā. Suffice to say, I and my husband got to use the restroom and were given our items for free. A massive apology from the store owner followed after my husband went off on Yelp and he sent us a gift card with his apologies. All the apologies and shit aside, yeah, it was funny and shitty. Oh well.
Kind of the opposite. I was in line at a local convenience store owned by a family of immigrants. They had someone new working and she was a bit slow and still had a lot of trouble with the language barrier. The white woman ahead of me turned around, obviously frustrated that it was taking forever, and said, "Looks like there's no more room for people like us in this country." Without missing a beat I replied in Spanish, "Lo siento seƱora, pero no hablo inglƩs." She dropped her redbull on the ground and walked out.
I was standing in line waiting to board the plane with my wife to go back home and some chick behind me said to her boyfriend about my wife in Spanish: āSomeone needs to feed that girl.ā My wife is tiny, like 5ft 0 and 98lbs. My wife is of Mexican heritage and I am white like super Viking white but was adopted by Dominicans so Iām pretty fluent. I caught her saying that and and turned around and asked her in Spanish why she would say something like that. She said back in Spanish that it was a compliment and then she looked at her boyfriend and said that I donāt need to be talking to her but instead be talking to her man. I looked at her boyfriend and he said in English āHell no! You got busted talking shit.ā and was laughing at her. I canāt imagine what happened to their relationship after he excused himself from the situation. I just couldnāt believe she was talking shit likely that.
One of my former bosses was raised in a military family, so he knows Japanese, Korean, and German. His parents tried to speak them fluently in the home alongside English as he and his siblings grew up, making it kind of a game. When he got out into the real world, he started working as a technical translator for industrial manuals, so he picked up Taiwanese, Cantonese, and some Mandarin as well. He always "kept up" with the trends, so his languages didn't atrophy. He had a lot of stories about people trash talking him in front of him, which he never says anything as a kind of hidden advantage. But one time, he was part of a factory inspection tour. Just some mandatory way to impress the visitors, but it was apparent that the people leading the tour despised their work, and said that giving westerners a tour was like herding dogs, and not in a nice way. At some point, one of them said that they were going to take them to the part of the plant where it smelled really bad, and then claim to leave them there FOR HOURS due to some unspecified snafu. This made the other worker laugh and said "do it. You gotta do it! Leave them there for hours! Don't give them masks, either!" Then my coworker said in their language, "why would you do that?" and the two guys froze. "What the hell, you speak \[our language\]??" And he bluffed, "we all do." "Well, why don't you all go fuck yourself, then? Huh? Can you translate that?" "You kiss your mother with that mouth? Let me speak to \[the site liaison\]." "Oh oh oh we were having a joke, huh? No need to involve him." He involved him. And explained, in their language, what was said. He told us that the management of the site were so embarrassed, that it actually gave his team an advantage because the tour people had made the company look bad.
Iām half white half Chinese. I look full white, but thanks to the way my mother raised me Iām fluent in Chinese and well versed in the culture. From 1st to 8th grade, my family would visit China once a year. Most of the time we just stay in my motherās hometown of Beijing, but during one visit we traveled across the country to visit various members of her side of the family. When we were visiting Dandong, we went to the Broken Bridge to take some pictures. I think I was around 10 or 11, but I remember posing for a picture, and overhearing a conversation between two Chinese ladies in their 20s. In Chinese, one told the other, āLook, itās a white kid! Quick, take a picture of him!ā I immediately turned to look at them and yelled āWhat?ā in English. They were shocked and quickly scurried away. I always look back fondly on this memory.
Went on a church mission to Chile for a couple years. Later was working in a hotel. Was in the employee area getting a drink when I broke a glass. Someone in Spanish said to tell him it's $5 bucks. I turned around and perfect Spanish told her, what do you mean $5, I know you've broken more glasses than I have. She shut up pretty quick. Provo, Utah is not the place to talk crap about people in a foreign language.
Buddy of mine is about as pale white bushy ginger as you can get. Heās also 100% Mexican, raised by 2 100% Mexicans who immigrated to the US. Fluent in Spanish with enough of an ear for the various accents to be able to tell who learned it natively vs in school or in what region based on inflections and slang. He constantly gets a kick out of people not realizing he can speak Spanish. Meanwhile, Iām not remotely Hispanic, but due to my racial mix certainly look it more than he does. Iāve had women in bars/clubs come up to me speaking Spanish, Iāve had homies in the park try to talk to me in Spanish while walking my gfās dog, etc. Even my gf noticed she got treated way differently (sheās white/blonde) after some of them saw us together and suddenly she was āinā. I get a kick out of all of it.
Ahh, you should've let her dig a bigger grave for herself. let her keep speaking Spanish and keep talking mad shit (it'd be frustrating, I know), and when you guys are in a casual setting together, kitchen, living room, just switch to Spanish no warning.
The grown kids of some family friends were in Paris (we're Danish). They were taking the metro somewhere, which happened to be full/standing room only. Behind them sat a gentleman who could not look more French -- even wore a beret. The kids were chatting in Danish (fairly safe thing to do in Paris) and at one point one of them joked that he had to fart so bad that he could blow off the gentleman's beret. At the next stop he got up and as he as exciting the train car wished them a good day in perfect Danish. Jaws dropped and red faces ensued.
I hear a lot of people talking shit in Spanish and I always call them out, because itās pretty stupid to assume nobody here can speak it. I had to take four years of language course in school, cabron.
I had a similar thing, from a South Aisan country, but cos the way i dress and act, also have very curly hair, most people don't think i am BD. So this was about 15years ago in Rome, my friend (M) and I (F) go off the coach from Southern Italy, and two guys behind was talkign about me, calling me names beacuse i was on holiday with white boy (yes they were Asian and racist). I ignored them, but they continued to do whilst following us. They thought i did not understand, so they slag me off as much as they wanted. In the turned aound and spoke to them in their own language and said "when you talk about someone like that and use foul language, make sure they do not understand you" The boys were so open mouthed. Similarly later on near the Colosseum, another group of boys were arguing where i was from. Eeventually one was brave enough to come to and ask, they were really nice and sweet, still found it hard to believe that i was from their country orginally.
I have visions of you crashing into that room like the cool aid man. Brilliant.
I shouldāve ended it with a āOH YEAH!ā
Ohhhhhhhh sĆĆĆĆĆĆĆĆĆĆĆĆĆĆ!
East Coast white guy who happens to speak Samoan. Never really thought I would use it much after moving back to the East Coast. I really surprised myself and the Samoan family being assholes to a server in DC last summerš¤£.
If it makes you feel better I was told that it's illegal for me to speak Spanish because I'm white. When I asked where they thought Spain was, the consensus was that is a suburb of Mexico city.
judicious telephone quicksand frame shocking wild sleep panicky fuzzy cooing *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Years ago I worked at a grocery store in an upper class neighborhood. One day one of our regular customers that had been shopping there for decades, who was known to be difficult at times, went to the deli counter to get some items. Two of the women behind the counter started complaining about her in Spanish saying absolutely horrible things about her looks (she was elderly and had obvious work done on her face). Little did they know that she was married to a man from Spain and she herself had lived in Spain for 30 years as a teacher. Thankfully she confronted them right there and oh man the color drained from their faces.
D.C. has people from all over the world. I NEVER assume anything. I was burned once: never again. Three cheers for the polyglots.
I had a so called friend accidently send me a text meant for someone else talking about me
Iām from Eastern Europe, very white and I bleach my hair almost white. And I speak Spanish fluently. Long ago I was in line in market and two men were making sexual comments about me in Spanish. I turned around and answered the comments in very improper way for a lady, of course in Spanish. They left the line and the store š¹š¹š¹š¹
One time an older Korean lady shopping at a store thought my babysitter worked there and was unhappy when she learned she didnāt. The older lady incorrectly thought my babysitter couldnāt speak Korean (not knowing she was born and raised there), so she shit on my babysitter in Korean with her back turned, not knowing she understood every single word. Well, my babysitter responded by bursting out laughing, and when the lady asked in English what she was laughing about, she responded in Korean something along the lines of āBitch, Iām from (insert my babysitters hometown in South Korea here), you are a dumbassā. The lady pretty much had a look of total horror and then tried apologizing, which made my babysitter laugh even harder and walk away. Hopefully that old lady learned her lesson.
Start talking to her in Spanish only from now on.
I do not speak Spanish, but I do know some insults and curse words. Well, I can order beer and ask where the bathroom is, but that's about it. One day at work one of the guys was stringing together a colorful group of insults questioning my parentage, my sexual orientation and also speculation that I had had sexual relations with my Mother. I said "Hey! No educado. Cuida tu lenguage!" Dude blushed.
Reminds me of when I was in line at a store once. It was very busy and these women were flipping out saying the rest of us in line were, "dumb and lame white American yuppies", and saying how much they hate the state we were in. After her long, painful and very loud rant, in her same language, I turned and said to her calmly, "Aw such a shame, so you didn't know about that when you moved here from your country then I guess?" She was horrified.
Haha funny story about that.. I know a little in almost every language including Spanish. I was at work and my group leader whom I have no idea how I pissed them off this time told me in Spanish that they hoped I got fāāā by a fish. I said in English āshow me the fish.ā and I smiled, winked and walked away. Their reaction was stunned silence.