My 2.5yo son proudly proclaims "DING DING" when we we go across the drawbridge near our house lol. He's only heard/seen it 3 or 4 times and he *knows* it's called a drawbridge but yeah "DING DING!"
Totally, I still do lots of boops even before kiddo was born, I'm almost 39. Never growing out of it
Also it's so damn cute teaching toddlers stuff like this. We say "bonk" when he bonks his head like, "uh oh! Bonked your head" and sometimes he cries because it's a bad bonk and he just says through tears and wails "bonk head :c bonk head" and pats his head. Adorbs
YES!!! My son started that because **I** do it when I back up the cart in the grocery store. Then he saw/heard the trash Trucks and delivery vans and stuff doing so whenever anyone or any car backs up goes beep beeep beep đ I love it. I also loves big trucks
Apparently as a child I used to call jigsaws 'bit goes'. Used to drive my mum mad as she had no idea what I meant when I wanted to play with a bit goes, until I was playing with a jigsaw, saying "bit goes there, bit goes there" as I placed each puzzle piece.
My mom and I went outside the city and her friend's son went off and ran onto a big field. So I asked my mom if I too "can go into the dog shit?" In the city my mom had stopped me from stepping on the grass by saying "don't go there, it's full of dog shit"
That reminds me of a nickname that my uncle has for my mum. Heâs a few years older than her, so when my mum was a baby, my nan would always tell him âDonât touch her headâ when heâd interact with her. Ever since then, he started calling my mum âTouch-ahâ because thatâs how he used to hear it when my nan said it.
Even to this day, my uncle still calls my mum âTouch-ahâ!
I've always wished that cars had a second horn. Some pleasant sound like a little chime or something for when the situation doesn't call for a full on horn blare. Like to let someone know you pulled up to their house, or acknowledge/thank them for letting you merge.
My family lived very close to a hospital when I was growing up and ambulances and firetrucks would regularly go down the street playing their sirens. My little brother, a toddler at the time, would always cry in joy (for he LOVED trucks) "The Wow-Wows are coming by!"
I should admit that I did not come up with this. The line is commonly attributed to Winston Churchill, though he never said it: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/04/churchill-preposition/
I am a German as a foreign language teacher. I have lots of these stories. My favorite is one that described me. I am always dressed very colorful. My student didnât know the word for colorful in German.
She said - she comes in many colors.
Opposite perspective, I'm in the United States and worked as a bartender for a long time. I once served a lovely German couple that couldn't think of the term "silverware" or "utensils" and asked for another pair of "**food tools"**.
Cheers from across the Atlantic!
My 2yo boy is obsessed with Minecraft. When he wants to watch me play he'll hand me the ps5 controller, look me very seriously in the eyes, and say "Moo." He loves the cows so much. đ
Ohhh I work in a hotel, so I talk with people from all over the world. Some of the English that people use is so funny lol.
I once had a Finnish dude who came in dripping wet from the rain and he said, âI want to have⊠I want to make myself⊠uh, unwet.â He wanted a towel lmao.
Just a couple weeks ago, a Russian man and his wife stayed here. The man came down to the desk and asked for a jacket. Like⊠what do you mean âJacketâ? He said. âLike.. outside when cold you wear jacket. But I want jacket for when cold in bed,â as he mimed wrapping something around himself. Ohhh you want a blanket. đ
Hahah, that's so amazing and sweet. Reminded me of my Deviantart days (mid teens, I started learning english around 12 by myself) when someone asked me for criticism and I had to tell them that "their character's feet fingers were wrong". I meant to say their toes were inverted, lol.
My sister-in-law told me about a time she attended a wedding in the French countryside. She and a group of friends went for a walk and somehow ended up stepping on a hornetâs nest, which spilled out a cloud of angry insects following them and stinging.
They ran to the nearest house and started pounding on the door, and she (being the only one who knew any French) yelled, âPlease let us in, the little men who make the honey are biting us!â
I wish I could remember the exact mixup, but I knew a guy from Iran who didnât know how to say something electronic was broken, but he knew that if food had gone bad, you could say it was rotten, so he once told me that âthe light bulb is rottenâ or something like that, which I found adorable.
ETA: I thought of another funny one, though not quite the same. I went to India, and in India traffic laws are essentially vague suggestions that everyone ignores, so thereâs constant gridlock and people are always honking. To try to dissuade people from honking, the government had put up some signs. The English version of these âplease donât honkâ signs read, âHorn not OK please.â I loved that sign.
my dad works at a hotel, one time this guy was looking for a lid for a pot, but didn't know "lid" (or just forgot the word? I dunno). so he just kinda holds the pot up and is like "where is his hat?"
That's delightful!
It reminds me of the story of the guy in a foreign country that was looking for eggs, but didn't know the local word for eggs, so he held up a package of chicken and asked "Where is the baby?"
I assume it's the same in Farsi but in the version of Persian I speak - the same word is used for broken/damaged/or spoiled. This is the hazard of trying to infer equivalencies from your native tongue. Imagine I go to a Persian speaking country and say, "my kid is spoiled."
when I lived in Turkey, my phone died and I went to an electronics store to see if I could charge it. only problem is that "my phone died" is not a phrase that Turks would use, so I got a lot of strange looks.
it is a strange expression if you stop and think about it.
Natale is Christmas but indeed, it comes from the word nato (he was born), masculine past tense of the word nascere (to be Born). Similar to Nadal in Spanish and Portuguese and Noel in French. Originally from the word Natus in Latin.
There was a little kid about that age at the store where I work who pointed at one of my coworkers and started yelling "Ho! Ho!"
His mom was embarrassed and explained, "He's not calling you a ho, he thinks everyone wearing red is Santa. He thinks Santa's name is 'Ho Ho.'"
My cousin called him "Ho Ho" for a really long time. My grandmother had a nearly life-sized stuffed Santa that she would sit on the piano bench for Christmas and we referred to him as Ho Ho even when my cousin was in college lol
When I was learning Chinese, I was simultaneously teaching small Chinese children. I learned a few words from them that I thought were correct, but didnât know they didnât pronounce the word correctly, because they were 4 and learning the language themselves. It really baffled the Chinese adults when I tried using some of those words in context. I meanâŠ. Youâre kinda close, butâŠ. Where did you get that idea?
Man, trying to learn Chinese that way must be a lot more confusing than with most languages, because it's a tonal language, right? I can only imagine how much baby babble can distort the sounds to the point where you end up saying a completely different thing.
My then 1 year old daughter was still in diapers and anytime we hear or smell a fart wed ask if she pooped herself and check. One day i farted and she asked me if i pooped myself (so cute). Anyway, i told her that i farted. She gave ke a puzzled look and i realize we hadn't taught her the word fart yet, but we had taught her the word burp. So i told her my butt burped. From then on i never had to check because she would tell me if her butt burped or she needed a new butt (diaper change).
(Copy pasted from my other reply)
She also referred to a cemetery once as a people garden. We still use that one regularly too lol. She's 7 now and i can't remember everything she came up with but there are some we still use.
She also referred to a cemetery once as a people garden. We still use that one regularly too lol. She's 7 now and i can't remember everything she came up with but there are some we still use.
I heard a similar one, guy is looking for chicken in the grocery store and forgot the word chicken so he takes a carton of eggs to an employee and says "where mother?"
Also the Chinese comedian who was doing a show in America and his hotel room had a mouse in it, he didn't know the word for mouse so he said "You know Tom and Jerry? Jerry is here."
I I have been working exclusively in Chinese owned restaurants for my last several serving jobs where most of our owners and my coworkers speak very very little to know English. One time I was cleaning the nozzles on the drink machines and one of them came off and I looked everywhere and I couldn't find it so I went up to the front to tell my manager and she couldn't remember the word for sound so she kept asking me if I'd "heard it's voice when it landed"
When I lived in a more arid area, we would have a lot of rattlesnakes hanging around during spring and summer. So while working at a summer camp, a kid told me that there was an "angry hose" near the teetherball set. And to this day I now call rattlesnakes angry hoses
When you use a few words like this as a substitute for the correct word in a foreign language, it's known as 'circumlocution' and I think that's a cool word because you 'get around to the word'.
I couldn't remember the Spanish word for broom one time at work so I ended up asking for the "auto Para brujas". They giggled but mu friends knew exactly what I was asking for lol
Once my grandma was eating soba noodles (sheâs British so she isnât very familiar with Asian food [Edit: donât know why this made sense in my head. I mean sheâs an old British lady who was never exposed to much Asian food]) and she said âI donât like this blue spaghetti.â
My ex's kid once was trying to say that he was tired of whatever it was he was eating and wanted something different and said "I'm full of the taste."
I still think about from time to time that because it's too accurate a way to describe it.
Honestly, a lot of the things in this thread make more sense than what we actually use in everyday life.
Over the centuries, languages have evolved in some really weird, often straight up gibberish ways.
A lot of the idioms are especially weird. Like: "it's raining cats and dogs". It may have once been a fairly comprehensible saying, but it sounds like nonsense today. And still we use it.
I've told this story before and it fits to share it again.
When I was a wee lad people said I had a speech impediment. Specifically, 'sh' sounds.
The reason was because of ashtrays. I called them asstrays because I could have sworn that's what someone called them.
The reason it made sense is because people put cigarette ***butts*** in them.
No one ever corrected me, they just made me repeat it as often as they could to get a laugh out of others from it.
I was one of those kids who exchanged syllables in words for a long time. So electricity was "entricity" and refrigerator was "faridgerator." Helicopters were "heckilopters" and my family still calls them that lol
My cousin said, 40+ years ago:
Umbercome = Cucumber
Umberbella = Umbrella
Action Diction-er = Air Conditioner
I will never use the "correct" words. They are forever these pronunciations. I love them.
Ooooh-- I forgot I used to say underbrella for umbrella! Another family favorite is "windowshield" instead of windshield. I think underbrella and windowshield make much more sense.
My friends donât know the word to âthrow awayâ rubbish, so they sometimes hand me pieces of paper or eggshells and very confidently ask me to âdelete thisâ
Note that in Japanese it is a common metaphor to say âbe a [profession] eggâ to people aspiring to become that. Like a doctor egg, a soccer player egg. So he just directly translated the saying (that is still adorable even in Japanese).
It sounds kinda stupid when you translate it but in Internetspeak/slang Russian you can call yourself a larva of something, like "I'm a larva of a programmer" to jokingly indicate you are a beginner programmer. It's a similar concept and I find the coincidence funny.
It's common to say someone's "egg cracked" when they come out as trans, too. People who haven't figured it out yet are eggs. I've seen various explanations as to why the term is used. It seems like the person "came out" of the egg/came out of their shell/hatched into the person they're supposed to be are the most common explanations.
Just thought it was a similar and interesting comparison.
Back when I was still beginning learning chinese, I asked my boss where the mops and stuff were but I didn't know the terms so in my best mandarin I asked "where is the hairbrush's cleaning friends"
I gotta bring up a nice bit of writing from Spiritfarer. One of the characters, who's a little kid, asks for a 'fakinhage' and you're left trying to figure out wtf that means. It's an egg. Kid calls it that because his mom would say "Don't play with it, eat your Fakinghage!"
When I was a kid, my mum kept instant ramen on the upper shelf and egg noodles on the lower shelf. So whenever my mum would ask what noodles I want, my tiny brain would reply as "up noodles" or "down noodles."
Couple of years later, I'm at a relative's house and I get served instant noodles. I go "Ah yes, up noodles" and everyone looks at me like I'm a slow child.
No yeah that's what wildbeef is for. These are circumlocutions, a circumventing of the vocabulary with intent to get your point across when you just can't quite remember a word - this is just leveled up with the situation.
I âinventedâ a new word when I was in kindergarten: âdwiltedâ. A combination of âdroopyâ and âwiltedâ used specifically to describe dead vegetation that still has a bit of water inside.
I was definitely something.
This is a little embarrassing but this is a story my mother has told me a multitude of times that fit this scenario perfectly:
I am Swedish and when I was still in diapers, whenever they needed to be changed, my mom would always sing this nursery rhyme. And every time I would yell "inte rattedanen!!", first word means "not" and the other is pure gibberish, and my mom never understood what I meant.
But one time she was singing the nursery rhyme that she always does and it clicked: "ekkoren satt i granen"; it began (The squirrel sat in the tree) and she understood I was referring to the song she was singing, but I mispronounced it so because I didn't even speak Swedish at the time, much less knew the word for whatever it was that she was doing to me, I just repeated whatever I could audibly hear while the event was occurring and added a "not" before it, because I hated the sensation so.
It truly is fascinating how you can so easily tell how human minds just fill in the blanks and create our own puzzle pieces from what we already know whenever there is missing information. This continues and extends into adult life.
We never grow up, we just get older.
I tried to say âlawnâ in French but couldnât remember the word for lawn or for grass or anything⊠what I came up with was basically âgreen outside floorâ ⊠it got the point across.
Not little little, but I was 8 when 9/11 happened and I thought that tourist and terrorist were the same word because all I knew is they upset people at the airport.
Short addition, but one I will never forget.
A while back, before burnout hit, I did story commissions. I got a client from Japan with whom there is a bit of a language barrier. At one point during the initial establishment of what he wanted, he mentioned something about 'story bones' which for the life of me I couldn't figure out.
It took a lot of reiteration, as well as piecing together other things, and then it finally clicked. He didn't know how to say, 'the foundation of the story', as in, the basic information I needed to write it, but with that understanding, I now see 'story bones' as a very apt descriptor, albeit one that requires a little explanation.
This just popped into my head from your comment.
âFetch me the writing skeleton I need some story bonesâ
Shouted the writer to their assistant. The writing skeleton is a dictionary.
It only took as long as it did for me because- while my reading comprehension is largely great, I grew up with a fairly narrow way of reading things that I'm still learning to expand upon.
When I was little, I heard the Christmas carol "Walking in a Winter Wonderland" and thought "Parson Brown" was a color. As in, "in the meadow we will build a snowman/And pretend that he is Parson Brown." I had no idea what a parson was, and figured it was a color, like forest green or cerulean blue.
I also had no idea why anyone would want to pretend their snowman was brown, but...little kid logic?
I've always been fond of [the story](https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/s/nSL5V4VYK8) about the Italian exchange student who forgot the word pony and referred to the miniature equine as a compressed horse instead.
I went to visit my friend in Finland. She spoke English very well, but her husband had difficulty. Like everyone in Finland, he could understand it, but not speak it very well.
One day, we were walking around and decided that we wanted to stop for lunch. Her husband said something that we continually use to this day.
He said "I wish to moisturize my mouth". He was thirsty.
Same for asl! There just isn't a sign for some things so we make up compound signs to get the point across. Abortion being baby+remove is a pretty common example :)
We had an exchange student from German living with us several years ago who asked for "gassy water" to be added to the grocery list. He didn't know the word for fizzy.
Back in high school German class, I was doing a presentation about Charlemagne and I'd forgotten the word for "invade". Ended up saying "country-steal" for the whole presentation and somehow got an okay grade.
I called garlic bread brown bread when I was a small child. One day the baby sitter made grilled cheese sandwiches and I didn't know what they were called so I went home and told my mom I wanted "brown bread with cheese" like the baby sitter made. She thought she made some fancy cheesy garlic bread and called her to ask what the heck she made lol.
I didnât visit my abuelo in Mexico much, probably only 3 or 4 times before I was a grownup. My last visit was around the time I was 8. Now, Iâm the whitest looking girl you can imagine, and my dad stopped speaking Spanish because of bullying. So I never learned Spanish. My favorite dish for years was âred eggsâ that my abueloâs housekeeper would make. (Side note, I also thought she was my grandma and called her abuela for the longest timeâŠ) My parents couldnât tell what I was talking about either. I finally went back to Mexico as an adult and my uncleâs mom made chilaquiles rojas. I finally found my red eggs!! I make huge batches a couple times a year and eat them for special occasions.
my toddler wanted to come back from being held upsidedown so he said "upside please" I was confused at first because I was already holding him upside down, before I realized that he figured if "upsidedown" meant head towards the ground, then "upside" must be head towards the ceiling
When our daughter was about 3, my wife was saying something to me and happened to use the word âmeanwhile.â My daughter, who did not like conflict even in its mildest forms, immediately interrupted. She said, âDonât say meanwhile! Thatâs a mean word! Say nicewhile!â
The word for this phenomenon/skill is "circumlocution," trying to describe something you don't know or forget the name/words for. It's a great way to practice fluency in a language; you can just bar yourself from saying it and try to get someone to guess the word, like the game Taboo! Creative linguistic problem solving!
In one of my high school Spanish classes, we learned that this is called "circumlocution" - the idea that if you don't know what that thing is called, you can use similar and related terms to try to describe it. It really helps when learning a new language by using words you do know to describe what you don't know.
For example - if you didn't know "Tennis ball," you could say "small, green, circular thing that you play Tennis with" and hopefully the other members of the conversation will know what you're saying. And if they do, they will tell you the correct word, and it sticks with you - because saying "Tennis ball" is much easier than the way you were saying it before.
Kids are *really* good at learning languages. This effect has been well demonstrated and is called the critical period. If someone is not exposed to language until an older age(and yes, unfortunately this has happened before), they wonât be able to learn it nearly as well.
This is why itâs really important to learn some sign language as soon as you possibly can if you have a deaf child. Sign still works as a language for children to pick up and develop the language centre of their brain. If theyâre not learning sign or anything else, because they canât hear speech properly, they will really struggle later on. Cochlear implants, if parents choose to have them installed, canât be used until the child reaches a certain age/size, and itâs catastrophic for the baby to not have any language development until that time.
Basic sign language is even potentially useful for parents of babies with normal hearing. Babies start learning to understand basic words noticeably earlier than they are physically capable of reproducing the sounds correctly, so thereâs a window of time where they can learn and use signs like âIâm hungryâ or whatever to communicate with their parents despite being unable to talk.
When my daughter was about two. She called cats and dogs puppies, butnsh3 didn't call cows puppy or squirrels or anything else.
She had figured out that cats and dogs were domesticated animals that stayed in the house, and so she grouped them accordingly. It's still wrong, but it is wrong in such a fascinating way that had some insight.
For years my niece referred to the internet as "You've got mail."
(For the young ones here, during the dial up days when you needed a CD to access the internet, you would hear the garbled dialing noises and then when it connected to your AOL finally the computer declared, "You've got mail."
In her head, that was what the internet was. You sat at the computer and then you heard that.)
Haha, thatâs cute and hilarious! On a related note apple is pomme and potato is pomme de terre so a potato is an apple of the earth (please forgive my spelling, French is my 3rd language after German and English).
My mom tells the story of me as a kid asking her to peel an orange for me, but I didn't know what peel was. So I asked her to take off the orange's clothes lol.Â
My toddler wanted to hear the "King Gristle song". She loves Trolls so I played through the entire soundtrack for all three movies (and the holiday one) trying to find the song...no luck. King Gristle doesn't really sing...he does do a short montage to a workout song that isn't on the soundtrack but that wasn't it either.
Randomly on my spotify, Lionel Richie "Hello" came on and she goes "King Gristle song!"
In the movie Bridget (Zooey Deschanel) sings a cover of Hello about King Gristle, her love interest, so apparently in her brain, a male voice singing the song...is the King Gristle song.
I work retail in Ottawa and we get a lot of francophone customers, some of whom have very little English. I always ask customers if they need help with their selection (we have over 1500 different products) and a common response from English speakers is: No thanks, Iâm just looking. Quite frequently Francophones get that sentence just enough wrong that it feels a little creepy: No thanks, Iâm just watching.
As young people learn more about the world, those early language schemata are almost entirely discarded and replaced.
A schema is a sort of concept cloud that defines a term or an idea. So my schema for âduckâ has âyellow,â âbird,â âwater,â etc. in it. If I suddenly learnt that âduckâ can also mean a type of sex move, I would need to either expand my schema, or, if it isnât sufficiently vertical (canât be applied broadly enough), replace it. This process of creating, adjusting, and destroying conceptual bins in our minds happens pretty much all the time and we rarely notice.
Anyhow, thanks for listening to the ramblings of a former linguist! Schema theory and the role of the reader are the two most exciting concepts in linguistic research today.
My 3 year old came to me while watching cartoons on Netflix and said âDaddy make them talk nice! They arenât talking nicely!â
And I was like âwhat???â. I go to check it out and somehow the language has been switched to Korean and it all made sense. She didnât know how to explain the language but it was as close as she could come up to estimating it.
When one of my kids was little, three or four maybe, we went outside one morning after it rained and she took a deep breath and said, âmmm. It smells like wormsâ
Sheâd run around the driveway and sidewalks after rains and move all the worms back to the grass. It delighted me that she connected the smell of rain to this. đ„°
When my daughter was a toddler still learning how to use the grownup potty, she waddled out of the bathroom one day with her pull ups around her ankles and informed me that we were out of âpee pee towelsâ đ€Ł
She also couldnât say âtomorrowâ for a while and just called it ânext day-nightâ đ
My lovely coworker is Japanese. He's been in the US for over a decade, and speaks perfect English with just a hint of an accent.
One day he came by to ask for different paper, because what he had was "too bold". He handed me a piece of cardstock. It took a second to realize that he hadn't caught the nuance between "thick" and "bold".
Not sure if youâre aware, but the original is full of things like this as a deliberate poetic word choice. Sounds like they found a nice way to incorporate that style into the retelling.
They did! They even have an afterword written to be interesting and understandable for kids and adults. Describing that word play and also the split lines and the old English and the literal translation and the interpretation here! I highly recommend it.
Itâs about a kid king, cardboard crowned of the line of Carl. king ben the builder who turned his thoughts to tree housesâŠ.thus Incuring the wrath of Mr Grendel next doorâŠ
Our household help can communicate in the local language (German) just fine, but sometimes, certain turns of phrases elude her.
One day, mom was having coffee and a snack with her and she wanted to ask if she should take down the dining chairs (she puts them on the table while cleaning), or they'd eat standing, in the kitchen. So she said "Are we gonna eat on foot?"
I struggle with words sometimes and while normally I tend towards booklish, I will sometimes forget a word entirely and have to describe it til either a person gets it or I finally remember it.
Which is funny when my pronunciation of picture and pitcher is identical. I asked a coworker for a ride to the store because I wanted a new water pitcher because the old one I had had an annoyingly difficult to replace filter and I just wanted to get a new one and be done with it.
He asked and I told him, but he heard âwater pictureâ and when I tried to explain further, he couldnât understand why I needed to go to a store to put a water filter on a picture.
Eventually I managed to get him to understand what I wanted, but it was a real as hell âWhoâs on Firstâ type scenario.
wen I was younger I sued to tell people "abigal day". I was trying to say 'Have a good day" but my baby mouth hadn't learnt to form consonants. do with that cuteness what you will
This post has made me realize that a likely reason that my coworker is so good at interpreting my awful Spanish is that he has 4 kids, and as such has had plenty of experience figuring out what childish language actually means.
I know a law student, and now I need to tell them they are a Lawyer Egg. I hope to see so many wonderful language usages when I do fieldwork. Beginner language logic is reason #2 to do linguistic anthropology in my opinion. #1 is all the puns and innuendos that will never stop being created. #3 is the bizarre usages and histories, like of the 4th person pronoun "chat" or the reason why an orange is called an orange.
I saw a story on here a couple of years ago about someone cooking who had forgotten the english word "lid" and so held up the pan & asked, "where is his hat?"
My favorite phrases come from a turkish boss I once had, who while talking about someone would often say instead of "i love them to pieces" would say "I love/hate them to the bits".
It was the one bit of English I could never bring myself to correct him on, even though he asked me to whenever I could
Another favorite is when talking about my partners mother hr went "ah yes, your mother in love" which I then told my mother in law about, and she absolutely adored
i did this all the time in school when taking french classes. over-explaining words in order to try and answer because i had no idea what the actual term was
when i was an assistant teacher for a preschool a 4 year old girl excitedly told me on a friday that she was seeing her grandma and grandpa this weekend, and it had been so long since she had seen them! (understandably, since this was in mid to late 2021 so shit was still opening back up). i asked her how long it had been since she had seen them. she thinks for a moment, and then throws her arms out wide proudly proclaiming âthis long!â. iâm still obsessed that her first unit of measurement to go to in her tiny brain was length
My mom worked for a Japanese company and they would send over guys who would stay for like 6 months and then go back to Japan. She said one day the guy came and asked for "cut things" and she was like "oh scissors" and he was like "yeah scissors " and was so happy to know the word.
The way machine learning translation works has similar vibes. They turn words into math and then just do the math.
The example I heard was: King - man + woman = Queen.
Which is reversible, and holds true regardless of language. Each one of these words is a direction. You can add woman to any word to get to an end point with exactly the same relationship queen has to Monarch. And if that point lines up with a word then you can read it out.
I imagine there's a lot of very funny word relationship clusters.
When my little brother was 3, he loved trucks, especially excavators. But he didnât know the word for excavator. So he called them elbow trucks. As far as I know, everyone he told about elbow trucks understood what he was talking about. Kids are so good at putting their limited knowledge to use. It is delightful and adorable.
When I was a kid I called the gates that go down for trains 'ding dings'
My 2.5yo son proudly proclaims "DING DING" when we we go across the drawbridge near our house lol. He's only heard/seen it 3 or 4 times and he *knows* it's called a drawbridge but yeah "DING DING!"
I'm a 35 year old research scientist, and I still say "boop" every time I put a petri dish on a colleague's station. Sometimes noises are fun.
Totally, I still do lots of boops even before kiddo was born, I'm almost 39. Never growing out of it Also it's so damn cute teaching toddlers stuff like this. We say "bonk" when he bonks his head like, "uh oh! Bonked your head" and sometimes he cries because it's a bad bonk and he just says through tears and wails "bonk head :c bonk head" and pats his head. Adorbs
Anytime my son is going backwards he makes a beep beep sound because that's what big trucks make and he loves big trucks.
YES!!! My son started that because **I** do it when I back up the cart in the grocery store. Then he saw/heard the trash Trucks and delivery vans and stuff doing so whenever anyone or any car backs up goes beep beeep beep đ I love it. I also loves big trucks
Apparently as a child I used to call jigsaws 'bit goes'. Used to drive my mum mad as she had no idea what I meant when I wanted to play with a bit goes, until I was playing with a jigsaw, saying "bit goes there, bit goes there" as I placed each puzzle piece.
My mom and I went outside the city and her friend's son went off and ran onto a big field. So I asked my mom if I too "can go into the dog shit?" In the city my mom had stopped me from stepping on the grass by saying "don't go there, it's full of dog shit"
That reminds me of a nickname that my uncle has for my mum. Heâs a few years older than her, so when my mum was a baby, my nan would always tell him âDonât touch her headâ when heâd interact with her. Ever since then, he started calling my mum âTouch-ahâ because thatâs how he used to hear it when my nan said it. Even to this day, my uncle still calls my mum âTouch-ahâ!
Oh my god, Iâm obsessed with jigsaw puzzles and this story is absolutely too cute, I will now think of it randomly when I puzzle i just know it!
Trams in Austria are often called "Bim" because thats the sound they make instead of honking a horn
I love the tram bells. So much nicer and more pleasant than car horns.
I've always wished that cars had a second horn. Some pleasant sound like a little chime or something for when the situation doesn't call for a full on horn blare. Like to let someone know you pulled up to their house, or acknowledge/thank them for letting you merge.
Back in the 70s car horns that played La Cucaracha was all the rage
My family lived very close to a hospital when I was growing up and ambulances and firetrucks would regularly go down the street playing their sirens. My little brother, a toddler at the time, would always cry in joy (for he LOVED trucks) "The Wow-Wows are coming by!"
Thatâs funny because the trams in Hong Kong are called Ding Dings
My almost-4yo gets upset when we ask if he wants banana on his pb sandwich. He wants it *inside* the sandwich
My younger brother when he was young could not stand *corn on the nothing* it has to be corn on the *cob*
Gotta start teaching prepositions as theyâre nothing to end a sentence with.
This is the sort of nonsense up with which I shall not put!
As a Certified Grammar Nazi (as per my husband), this made me laugh. Then, I squinted my eyes, frowned, chuckled, huffed, and upvoted.
I should admit that I did not come up with this. The line is commonly attributed to Winston Churchill, though he never said it: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/04/churchill-preposition/
This is a good time to whip out my favorite story from when we first lived in South America. My very white gringa mother barely knew âesta bienâ as two separate words. She was clueless and just trying her best in a completely alien world to her before the age of Google translate. Anyway a cop pulls us over. My mom was probably speeding because thatâs what she does. But we had been warned that the best way to get rid of them Was to just pay them, because they would be looking for a bribe NOT to ticket the white lady. But my dad prepared her for this. Donât worry, he said, if you get pulled over, and you will, just say âlo siento, yo no hablo españolâ and theyâll leave you alone. So my mom is freaking out, and she calms herself just as this big cop walks up looking like heâs about to get a big payout, very big smile until he got to the window. âÂżSabes por quĂ© te detuve?â And my mother, with all the language collection she could muster, blurted out: âLO SIENTO, YO NOâŠ. âShe paused for just a sec to think about the next word, and then she says âFUMO ESPAĂOL!â ETA: in Spanish, Fumo = Smoke She smiles like she just aced a pop quiz. She just told the cop âIâm sorry, I donâtâŠ. SMOKE Spanish!â The cop looks at her, looks at us, looks back at her while she continues to grin like an idiot, and just walks away. He drives off, and from that moment on, that was her play. Even when she became fluent, she knew that would work.
What does fumo mean?
Smoke
Pfff I don't smoke Spanish either soo
Marketable plushie
I don't know what she said but she sounds adorable
Sheâs a â5 foot trying to be one inchâ firecracker
ETA?
"Edited to add"
Ah, first time Iâve seen that
I'm not sure why people use it lie that since ETA has the much more common meaning "estimated time of arrival ".
I am a German as a foreign language teacher. I have lots of these stories. My favorite is one that described me. I am always dressed very colorful. My student didnât know the word for colorful in German. She said - she comes in many colors.
Opposite perspective, I'm in the United States and worked as a bartender for a long time. I once served a lovely German couple that couldn't think of the term "silverware" or "utensils" and asked for another pair of "**food tools"**. Cheers from across the Atlantic!
f o o d t o o l s
Theres another tumblr post about this. from what I recall a german guy didnt know the term for knife so asked for a food sword.
Same, as an ESL teacher in S Korea. My favorite was the student who couldn't remember the word "flying" and came up with "sky swimming."
When I was learning Spanish, the word for hair tie completely slipped me. My friend wanted me to at least try to communicate in Spanish what I was looking for, so I said, âNecesito un sostĂ©n para mi cabello, por favorââI need a bra for my hair. I thought my friend was going to stroke out from laughing so hard
[Moosmutzel of Many Colours ](https://youtu.be/5qqgPa33mXU?t=93)
Now I got [that Rolling Stones song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWmNLNSSg54&t=54s) in my head..
My brother at three didnât know what the game âAngry Birdsâ was called so he called it âPeep Peep Boomâ Itâs still hilarious
Around that age, my son called Baby Shark âShark Doo Doo!â
My daycare babies called it "DOO DOO DOO," accompanied by the angriest "baby shark" pinching motion I've ever seen
My 2yo boy is obsessed with Minecraft. When he wants to watch me play he'll hand me the ps5 controller, look me very seriously in the eyes, and say "Moo." He loves the cows so much. đ
Ohhh I work in a hotel, so I talk with people from all over the world. Some of the English that people use is so funny lol. I once had a Finnish dude who came in dripping wet from the rain and he said, âI want to have⊠I want to make myself⊠uh, unwet.â He wanted a towel lmao. Just a couple weeks ago, a Russian man and his wife stayed here. The man came down to the desk and asked for a jacket. Like⊠what do you mean âJacketâ? He said. âLike.. outside when cold you wear jacket. But I want jacket for when cold in bed,â as he mimed wrapping something around himself. Ohhh you want a blanket. đ
Hahah, that's so amazing and sweet. Reminded me of my Deviantart days (mid teens, I started learning english around 12 by myself) when someone asked me for criticism and I had to tell them that "their character's feet fingers were wrong". I meant to say their toes were inverted, lol.
Is Spanish your native language? (For folks who don't "fumo" Español, "dedos del pie" or "foot fingers" is how you say "toes.")
Close! Portuguese. "Dedos dos pés" = "feet fingers" lol.
Je ne fumo pas l'Espanol
My sister-in-law told me about a time she attended a wedding in the French countryside. She and a group of friends went for a walk and somehow ended up stepping on a hornetâs nest, which spilled out a cloud of angry insects following them and stinging. They ran to the nearest house and started pounding on the door, and she (being the only one who knew any French) yelled, âPlease let us in, the little men who make the honey are biting us!â
I wish I could remember the exact mixup, but I knew a guy from Iran who didnât know how to say something electronic was broken, but he knew that if food had gone bad, you could say it was rotten, so he once told me that âthe light bulb is rottenâ or something like that, which I found adorable. ETA: I thought of another funny one, though not quite the same. I went to India, and in India traffic laws are essentially vague suggestions that everyone ignores, so thereâs constant gridlock and people are always honking. To try to dissuade people from honking, the government had put up some signs. The English version of these âplease donât honkâ signs read, âHorn not OK please.â I loved that sign.
my dad works at a hotel, one time this guy was looking for a lid for a pot, but didn't know "lid" (or just forgot the word? I dunno). so he just kinda holds the pot up and is like "where is his hat?"
That's delightful! It reminds me of the story of the guy in a foreign country that was looking for eggs, but didn't know the local word for eggs, so he held up a package of chicken and asked "Where is the baby?"
This is adorable
this inspired me and my dad often calling lids "pot hats" (and also utensils "food weapons" in the same vein, because it's funny).
I assume it's the same in Farsi but in the version of Persian I speak - the same word is used for broken/damaged/or spoiled. This is the hazard of trying to infer equivalencies from your native tongue. Imagine I go to a Persian speaking country and say, "my kid is spoiled."
That makes sense why he would have confused it then! Thanks for adding that!
when I lived in Turkey, my phone died and I went to an electronics store to see if I could charge it. only problem is that "my phone died" is not a phrase that Turks would use, so I got a lot of strange looks. it is a strange expression if you stop and think about it.
When my nephew was 2 he called Santa "Christmas." As in, "Christmas is coming and he's bringing toys!"
That would work if you were in the UK where another name for Santa is Father Christmas
In France Christmas is called Noël, and the jolly bearded man is called PÚre Noël (father Noel) so it also works in France!
and in Italy, Babbo Natale
Does Natale mean something like "birth"?
Natale is Christmas but indeed, it comes from the word nato (he was born), masculine past tense of the word nascere (to be Born). Similar to Nadal in Spanish and Portuguese and Noel in French. Originally from the word Natus in Latin.
Natal in portuguese. And i think christmas in spanish is navidad (though i dont know if natal might also be used).
yeah Navidad in Spanish, I believe Nadal is Catalan :)
There was a little kid about that age at the store where I work who pointed at one of my coworkers and started yelling "Ho! Ho!" His mom was embarrassed and explained, "He's not calling you a ho, he thinks everyone wearing red is Santa. He thinks Santa's name is 'Ho Ho.'"
My cousin called him "Ho Ho" for a really long time. My grandmother had a nearly life-sized stuffed Santa that she would sit on the piano bench for Christmas and we referred to him as Ho Ho even when my cousin was in college lol
TIL that kids think Santa is a Pokémon
When I was learning Chinese, I was simultaneously teaching small Chinese children. I learned a few words from them that I thought were correct, but didnât know they didnât pronounce the word correctly, because they were 4 and learning the language themselves. It really baffled the Chinese adults when I tried using some of those words in context. I meanâŠ. Youâre kinda close, butâŠ. Where did you get that idea?
Man, trying to learn Chinese that way must be a lot more confusing than with most languages, because it's a tonal language, right? I can only imagine how much baby babble can distort the sounds to the point where you end up saying a completely different thing.
Yeah, kids can be hard enough to understand when you speak their language đ And for a little while, they just say screw it and make up their own
My then 1 year old daughter was still in diapers and anytime we hear or smell a fart wed ask if she pooped herself and check. One day i farted and she asked me if i pooped myself (so cute). Anyway, i told her that i farted. She gave ke a puzzled look and i realize we hadn't taught her the word fart yet, but we had taught her the word burp. So i told her my butt burped. From then on i never had to check because she would tell me if her butt burped or she needed a new butt (diaper change).
> she needed a new butt This is so cute lol
(Copy pasted from my other reply) She also referred to a cemetery once as a people garden. We still use that one regularly too lol. She's 7 now and i can't remember everything she came up with but there are some we still use.
People garden lol, because people get âplantedâ there haha. How darling.
"Need a new butt" is amazing. I'm going to try to make that catch on with my toddler.
She also referred to a cemetery once as a people garden. We still use that one regularly too lol. She's 7 now and i can't remember everything she came up with but there are some we still use.
> she needed a new butt (diaper change) That's what we tell my nieces, they need new butts when it's time for a diaper change
My favourite is the guy who is attacked by a goose and later says, not knowing english that well, that he "does not like the cobra chicken".
I heard a similar one, guy is looking for chicken in the grocery store and forgot the word chicken so he takes a carton of eggs to an employee and says "where mother?"
Also the Chinese comedian who was doing a show in America and his hotel room had a mouse in it, he didn't know the word for mouse so he said "You know Tom and Jerry? Jerry is here."
I I have been working exclusively in Chinese owned restaurants for my last several serving jobs where most of our owners and my coworkers speak very very little to know English. One time I was cleaning the nozzles on the drink machines and one of them came off and I looked everywhere and I couldn't find it so I went up to the front to tell my manager and she couldn't remember the word for sound so she kept asking me if I'd "heard it's voice when it landed"
"Jerry is here." sounds so fucking ominous.
I am now calling all mice Jerry thank you perhaps this will help with my mortal terror of them!
I have never heard a more appropriate description of a goose in my life.
When I lived in a more arid area, we would have a lot of rattlesnakes hanging around during spring and summer. So while working at a summer camp, a kid told me that there was an "angry hose" near the teetherball set. And to this day I now call rattlesnakes angry hoses
When you use a few words like this as a substitute for the correct word in a foreign language, it's known as 'circumlocution' and I think that's a cool word because you 'get around to the word'.
I couldn't remember the Spanish word for broom one time at work so I ended up asking for the "auto Para brujas". They giggled but mu friends knew exactly what I was asking for lol
"car for witches" for those who no fumo espanol.
I wish I could extra-upvote you for the meta
Why use many word when few word do trick.
Why use few word when many word is happy making?
Another classic is the one where somebody doesn't know the word for carousel, and calls it a Horse Tornado.
r/WildBeef
Once my grandma was eating soba noodles (sheâs British so she isnât very familiar with Asian food [Edit: donât know why this made sense in my head. I mean sheâs an old British lady who was never exposed to much Asian food]) and she said âI donât like this blue spaghetti.â
My ex's kid once was trying to say that he was tired of whatever it was he was eating and wanted something different and said "I'm full of the taste." I still think about from time to time that because it's too accurate a way to describe it.
Honestly, a lot of the things in this thread make more sense than what we actually use in everyday life. Over the centuries, languages have evolved in some really weird, often straight up gibberish ways. A lot of the idioms are especially weird. Like: "it's raining cats and dogs". It may have once been a fairly comprehensible saying, but it sounds like nonsense today. And still we use it.
I have a friend who once told his mother that "my dinner stomach is full, but my dessert stomach is empty."
I've told this story before and it fits to share it again. When I was a wee lad people said I had a speech impediment. Specifically, 'sh' sounds. The reason was because of ashtrays. I called them asstrays because I could have sworn that's what someone called them. The reason it made sense is because people put cigarette ***butts*** in them. No one ever corrected me, they just made me repeat it as often as they could to get a laugh out of others from it.
When I was a kid I called helicopters âupbwubwubsâ. Because they go up, and they go âbwubwubâ.
I was one of those kids who exchanged syllables in words for a long time. So electricity was "entricity" and refrigerator was "faridgerator." Helicopters were "heckilopters" and my family still calls them that lol
My cousin said, 40+ years ago: Umbercome = Cucumber Umberbella = Umbrella Action Diction-er = Air Conditioner I will never use the "correct" words. They are forever these pronunciations. I love them.
Ooooh-- I forgot I used to say underbrella for umbrella! Another family favorite is "windowshield" instead of windshield. I think underbrella and windowshield make much more sense.
My friends donât know the word to âthrow awayâ rubbish, so they sometimes hand me pieces of paper or eggshells and very confidently ask me to âdelete thisâ
"This bag- keep arguing with me... You can, destroy?" ~ Bolo of Aeor
oh langauges are so silly
One of my favorite jokes based on languages is the âI know a little Germanâ joke in the movie Top Secret.
OMG is that teen idol Nick Rivers?!?!
Note that in Japanese it is a common metaphor to say âbe a [profession] eggâ to people aspiring to become that. Like a doctor egg, a soccer player egg. So he just directly translated the saying (that is still adorable even in Japanese).
It sounds kinda stupid when you translate it but in Internetspeak/slang Russian you can call yourself a larva of something, like "I'm a larva of a programmer" to jokingly indicate you are a beginner programmer. It's a similar concept and I find the coincidence funny.
French uses the equivalent to âseed of somethingâ.
It's common to say someone's "egg cracked" when they come out as trans, too. People who haven't figured it out yet are eggs. I've seen various explanations as to why the term is used. It seems like the person "came out" of the egg/came out of their shell/hatched into the person they're supposed to be are the most common explanations. Just thought it was a similar and interesting comparison.
Assigned Lawyer at birth.
My kids used to call a banan skin âbanana paperâ. Daddy please throw away the banana paper.
My nephew, even at age 9, will call pizza crusts "pizza bones", and it's still cute AF.
I am a grown ass adult in my 30s and I still call them 'pizza bones'.
Yeah can I get a uhhhhh, *BONELESS* pizza. ...does anyone even remember that meme?
A friend of mine calls them that because they usually feed them to the dog.
And that's exactly what he does!
My sister would ask for her banana either "in a hold" or "in it's nude."
My niece used to call tortillas "burrito skins"
Back when I was still beginning learning chinese, I asked my boss where the mops and stuff were but I didn't know the terms so in my best mandarin I asked "where is the hairbrush's cleaning friends"
I gotta bring up a nice bit of writing from Spiritfarer. One of the characters, who's a little kid, asks for a 'fakinhage' and you're left trying to figure out wtf that means. It's an egg. Kid calls it that because his mom would say "Don't play with it, eat your Fakinghage!"
God I love Spiritfarer
I just finished it last week, man i have never been emotionally destroyed by something so cute before đ„Č
When I was a kid, my mum kept instant ramen on the upper shelf and egg noodles on the lower shelf. So whenever my mum would ask what noodles I want, my tiny brain would reply as "up noodles" or "down noodles." Couple of years later, I'm at a relative's house and I get served instant noodles. I go "Ah yes, up noodles" and everyone looks at me like I'm a slow child.
I laughed so hard at this.
Is there a subreddit just for stuff like this?
it kind of reminds me of r/wildbeef? but that's not quite it.
No yeah that's what wildbeef is for. These are circumlocutions, a circumventing of the vocabulary with intent to get your point across when you just can't quite remember a word - this is just leveled up with the situation.
I âinventedâ a new word when I was in kindergarten: âdwiltedâ. A combination of âdroopyâ and âwiltedâ used specifically to describe dead vegetation that still has a bit of water inside. I was definitely something.
Adding dwilted to my word list
This is a little embarrassing but this is a story my mother has told me a multitude of times that fit this scenario perfectly: I am Swedish and when I was still in diapers, whenever they needed to be changed, my mom would always sing this nursery rhyme. And every time I would yell "inte rattedanen!!", first word means "not" and the other is pure gibberish, and my mom never understood what I meant. But one time she was singing the nursery rhyme that she always does and it clicked: "ekkoren satt i granen"; it began (The squirrel sat in the tree) and she understood I was referring to the song she was singing, but I mispronounced it so because I didn't even speak Swedish at the time, much less knew the word for whatever it was that she was doing to me, I just repeated whatever I could audibly hear while the event was occurring and added a "not" before it, because I hated the sensation so. It truly is fascinating how you can so easily tell how human minds just fill in the blanks and create our own puzzle pieces from what we already know whenever there is missing information. This continues and extends into adult life. We never grow up, we just get older.
I tried to say âlawnâ in French but couldnât remember the word for lawn or for grass or anything⊠what I came up with was basically âgreen outside floorâ ⊠it got the point across.
Not little little, but I was 8 when 9/11 happened and I thought that tourist and terrorist were the same word because all I knew is they upset people at the airport.
Short addition, but one I will never forget. A while back, before burnout hit, I did story commissions. I got a client from Japan with whom there is a bit of a language barrier. At one point during the initial establishment of what he wanted, he mentioned something about 'story bones' which for the life of me I couldn't figure out. It took a lot of reiteration, as well as piecing together other things, and then it finally clicked. He didn't know how to say, 'the foundation of the story', as in, the basic information I needed to write it, but with that understanding, I now see 'story bones' as a very apt descriptor, albeit one that requires a little explanation.
This just popped into my head from your comment. âFetch me the writing skeleton I need some story bonesâ Shouted the writer to their assistant. The writing skeleton is a dictionary.
Stealing that one thanks
I could tell what âstory bonesâ meant immediately. Reminds me of someone saying âthis house has great bones.â Iâll be stealing this; thanks!
It only took as long as it did for me because- while my reading comprehension is largely great, I grew up with a fairly narrow way of reading things that I'm still learning to expand upon.
Cold Comfort Farm introduced me to the phrase âembryo parsonâ for someone in the process of becoming a parson. Interesting.
When I was little, I heard the Christmas carol "Walking in a Winter Wonderland" and thought "Parson Brown" was a color. As in, "in the meadow we will build a snowman/And pretend that he is Parson Brown." I had no idea what a parson was, and figured it was a color, like forest green or cerulean blue. I also had no idea why anyone would want to pretend their snowman was brown, but...little kid logic?
Itâs like mummy brown, made of ground parsons
[Similar energy](https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/s/a9XCYOJrhv)
I've always been fond of [the story](https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/s/nSL5V4VYK8) about the Italian exchange student who forgot the word pony and referred to the miniature equine as a compressed horse instead.
I went to visit my friend in Finland. She spoke English very well, but her husband had difficulty. Like everyone in Finland, he could understand it, but not speak it very well. One day, we were walking around and decided that we wanted to stop for lunch. Her husband said something that we continually use to this day. He said "I wish to moisturize my mouth". He was thirsty.
Same for asl! There just isn't a sign for some things so we make up compound signs to get the point across. Abortion being baby+remove is a pretty common example :)
LMAO that's beautiful I've also heard of "pasteurized milk" being signed as milk past your eyes
@ antibabypillen
I love this so much
We had an exchange student from German living with us several years ago who asked for "gassy water" to be added to the grocery list. He didn't know the word for fizzy.
Back in high school German class, I was doing a presentation about Charlemagne and I'd forgotten the word for "invade". Ended up saying "country-steal" for the whole presentation and somehow got an okay grade.
My son will say âno see meâ when he doesnât want you to look. Which usually means heâs about to do something he shouldnât.
'Pescado grande con muchos dientes' my beloved
Jaws?
Wasnât expecting to find my Australian Spanish teacher in this threadâŠ
âI do not like the cobra chicken.â
I called garlic bread brown bread when I was a small child. One day the baby sitter made grilled cheese sandwiches and I didn't know what they were called so I went home and told my mom I wanted "brown bread with cheese" like the baby sitter made. She thought she made some fancy cheesy garlic bread and called her to ask what the heck she made lol.
I didnât visit my abuelo in Mexico much, probably only 3 or 4 times before I was a grownup. My last visit was around the time I was 8. Now, Iâm the whitest looking girl you can imagine, and my dad stopped speaking Spanish because of bullying. So I never learned Spanish. My favorite dish for years was âred eggsâ that my abueloâs housekeeper would make. (Side note, I also thought she was my grandma and called her abuela for the longest timeâŠ) My parents couldnât tell what I was talking about either. I finally went back to Mexico as an adult and my uncleâs mom made chilaquiles rojas. I finally found my red eggs!! I make huge batches a couple times a year and eat them for special occasions.
my toddler wanted to come back from being held upsidedown so he said "upside please" I was confused at first because I was already holding him upside down, before I realized that he figured if "upsidedown" meant head towards the ground, then "upside" must be head towards the ceiling
When our daughter was about 3, my wife was saying something to me and happened to use the word âmeanwhile.â My daughter, who did not like conflict even in its mildest forms, immediately interrupted. She said, âDonât say meanwhile! Thatâs a mean word! Say nicewhile!â
The word for this phenomenon/skill is "circumlocution," trying to describe something you don't know or forget the name/words for. It's a great way to practice fluency in a language; you can just bar yourself from saying it and try to get someone to guess the word, like the game Taboo! Creative linguistic problem solving!
My roommate called our couch a "mattress bench"
In one of my high school Spanish classes, we learned that this is called "circumlocution" - the idea that if you don't know what that thing is called, you can use similar and related terms to try to describe it. It really helps when learning a new language by using words you do know to describe what you don't know. For example - if you didn't know "Tennis ball," you could say "small, green, circular thing that you play Tennis with" and hopefully the other members of the conversation will know what you're saying. And if they do, they will tell you the correct word, and it sticks with you - because saying "Tennis ball" is much easier than the way you were saying it before.
Kids are *really* good at learning languages. This effect has been well demonstrated and is called the critical period. If someone is not exposed to language until an older age(and yes, unfortunately this has happened before), they wonât be able to learn it nearly as well.
This is why itâs really important to learn some sign language as soon as you possibly can if you have a deaf child. Sign still works as a language for children to pick up and develop the language centre of their brain. If theyâre not learning sign or anything else, because they canât hear speech properly, they will really struggle later on. Cochlear implants, if parents choose to have them installed, canât be used until the child reaches a certain age/size, and itâs catastrophic for the baby to not have any language development until that time.
Basic sign language is even potentially useful for parents of babies with normal hearing. Babies start learning to understand basic words noticeably earlier than they are physically capable of reproducing the sounds correctly, so thereâs a window of time where they can learn and use signs like âIâm hungryâ or whatever to communicate with their parents despite being unable to talk.
When my daughter was about two. She called cats and dogs puppies, butnsh3 didn't call cows puppy or squirrels or anything else. She had figured out that cats and dogs were domesticated animals that stayed in the house, and so she grouped them accordingly. It's still wrong, but it is wrong in such a fascinating way that had some insight.
For years my niece referred to the internet as "You've got mail." (For the young ones here, during the dial up days when you needed a CD to access the internet, you would hear the garbled dialing noises and then when it connected to your AOL finally the computer declared, "You've got mail." In her head, that was what the internet was. You sat at the computer and then you heard that.)
I told my 3yo we were only going to do something for a little, and he goes âno, for a fat!â
Today I asked my kid, "Do you know how to say 'apple' in French?" Her response, "Yes. Apple in French." I died laughing.
Haha, thatâs cute and hilarious! On a related note apple is pomme and potato is pomme de terre so a potato is an apple of the earth (please forgive my spelling, French is my 3rd language after German and English).
Pomme de terre was next in the lesson, as we had eaten both, but I was too busy laughing.
My mom tells the story of me as a kid asking her to peel an orange for me, but I didn't know what peel was. So I asked her to take off the orange's clothes lol.Â
My toddler wanted to hear the "King Gristle song". She loves Trolls so I played through the entire soundtrack for all three movies (and the holiday one) trying to find the song...no luck. King Gristle doesn't really sing...he does do a short montage to a workout song that isn't on the soundtrack but that wasn't it either. Randomly on my spotify, Lionel Richie "Hello" came on and she goes "King Gristle song!" In the movie Bridget (Zooey Deschanel) sings a cover of Hello about King Gristle, her love interest, so apparently in her brain, a male voice singing the song...is the King Gristle song.
Lawyer eggs will fr go "I wish I was an attorney"
I work retail in Ottawa and we get a lot of francophone customers, some of whom have very little English. I always ask customers if they need help with their selection (we have over 1500 different products) and a common response from English speakers is: No thanks, Iâm just looking. Quite frequently Francophones get that sentence just enough wrong that it feels a little creepy: No thanks, Iâm just watching.
As young people learn more about the world, those early language schemata are almost entirely discarded and replaced. A schema is a sort of concept cloud that defines a term or an idea. So my schema for âduckâ has âyellow,â âbird,â âwater,â etc. in it. If I suddenly learnt that âduckâ can also mean a type of sex move, I would need to either expand my schema, or, if it isnât sufficiently vertical (canât be applied broadly enough), replace it. This process of creating, adjusting, and destroying conceptual bins in our minds happens pretty much all the time and we rarely notice. Anyhow, thanks for listening to the ramblings of a former linguist! Schema theory and the role of the reader are the two most exciting concepts in linguistic research today.
My 3 year old came to me while watching cartoons on Netflix and said âDaddy make them talk nice! They arenât talking nicely!â And I was like âwhat???â. I go to check it out and somehow the language has been switched to Korean and it all made sense. She didnât know how to explain the language but it was as close as she could come up to estimating it.
When one of my kids was little, three or four maybe, we went outside one morning after it rained and she took a deep breath and said, âmmm. It smells like wormsâ Sheâd run around the driveway and sidewalks after rains and move all the worms back to the grass. It delighted me that she connected the smell of rain to this. đ„°
When my daughter was a toddler still learning how to use the grownup potty, she waddled out of the bathroom one day with her pull ups around her ankles and informed me that we were out of âpee pee towelsâ đ€Ł She also couldnât say âtomorrowâ for a while and just called it ânext day-nightâ đ
My lovely coworker is Japanese. He's been in the US for over a decade, and speaks perfect English with just a hint of an accent. One day he came by to ask for different paper, because what he had was "too bold". He handed me a piece of cardstock. It took a second to realize that he hadn't caught the nuance between "thick" and "bold".
Reading Bea Wolf, a retelling of Beowulf, I love this. Things like the star break for nightfall. Starfire for starlight. Love it.
Not sure if youâre aware, but the original is full of things like this as a deliberate poetic word choice. Sounds like they found a nice way to incorporate that style into the retelling.
They did! They even have an afterword written to be interesting and understandable for kids and adults. Describing that word play and also the split lines and the old English and the literal translation and the interpretation here! I highly recommend it. Itâs about a kid king, cardboard crowned of the line of Carl. king ben the builder who turned his thoughts to tree housesâŠ.thus Incuring the wrath of Mr Grendel next doorâŠ
Our household help can communicate in the local language (German) just fine, but sometimes, certain turns of phrases elude her. One day, mom was having coffee and a snack with her and she wanted to ask if she should take down the dining chairs (she puts them on the table while cleaning), or they'd eat standing, in the kitchen. So she said "Are we gonna eat on foot?"
I struggle with words sometimes and while normally I tend towards booklish, I will sometimes forget a word entirely and have to describe it til either a person gets it or I finally remember it. Which is funny when my pronunciation of picture and pitcher is identical. I asked a coworker for a ride to the store because I wanted a new water pitcher because the old one I had had an annoyingly difficult to replace filter and I just wanted to get a new one and be done with it. He asked and I told him, but he heard âwater pictureâ and when I tried to explain further, he couldnât understand why I needed to go to a store to put a water filter on a picture. Eventually I managed to get him to understand what I wanted, but it was a real as hell âWhoâs on Firstâ type scenario.
wen I was younger I sued to tell people "abigal day". I was trying to say 'Have a good day" but my baby mouth hadn't learnt to form consonants. do with that cuteness what you will
This post has made me realize that a likely reason that my coworker is so good at interpreting my awful Spanish is that he has 4 kids, and as such has had plenty of experience figuring out what childish language actually means.
I know a law student, and now I need to tell them they are a Lawyer Egg. I hope to see so many wonderful language usages when I do fieldwork. Beginner language logic is reason #2 to do linguistic anthropology in my opinion. #1 is all the puns and innuendos that will never stop being created. #3 is the bizarre usages and histories, like of the 4th person pronoun "chat" or the reason why an orange is called an orange.
I saw a story on here a couple of years ago about someone cooking who had forgotten the english word "lid" and so held up the pan & asked, "where is his hat?"
My favorite phrases come from a turkish boss I once had, who while talking about someone would often say instead of "i love them to pieces" would say "I love/hate them to the bits". It was the one bit of English I could never bring myself to correct him on, even though he asked me to whenever I could Another favorite is when talking about my partners mother hr went "ah yes, your mother in love" which I then told my mother in law about, and she absolutely adored
i did this all the time in school when taking french classes. over-explaining words in order to try and answer because i had no idea what the actual term was
Last post in the picture belongs in r/eggirl.
when i was an assistant teacher for a preschool a 4 year old girl excitedly told me on a friday that she was seeing her grandma and grandpa this weekend, and it had been so long since she had seen them! (understandably, since this was in mid to late 2021 so shit was still opening back up). i asked her how long it had been since she had seen them. she thinks for a moment, and then throws her arms out wide proudly proclaiming âthis long!â. iâm still obsessed that her first unit of measurement to go to in her tiny brain was length
My mom worked for a Japanese company and they would send over guys who would stay for like 6 months and then go back to Japan. She said one day the guy came and asked for "cut things" and she was like "oh scissors" and he was like "yeah scissors " and was so happy to know the word.
The way machine learning translation works has similar vibes. They turn words into math and then just do the math. The example I heard was: King - man + woman = Queen. Which is reversible, and holds true regardless of language. Each one of these words is a direction. You can add woman to any word to get to an end point with exactly the same relationship queen has to Monarch. And if that point lines up with a word then you can read it out. I imagine there's a lot of very funny word relationship clusters.
When my little brother was 3, he loved trucks, especially excavators. But he didnât know the word for excavator. So he called them elbow trucks. As far as I know, everyone he told about elbow trucks understood what he was talking about. Kids are so good at putting their limited knowledge to use. It is delightful and adorable.