English words that conflict with your language.

**Centurio Nixalsverdrus** · 12-15-2009, 21:45

A German supermarket once advertised a bag for sport clothing as "Bodybag", since "Body" (with y in plural) is "German" for a part of female clothing.

Another one is "aktuell" which means "up to date" in English which we always confuse with "actually" (tatsächlich).

**Subotan** · 12-15-2009, 23:01

Originally Posted by Ituralde

1) gift, which means a present in English is spelled and pronounced exactly like the German word for poison. There's just so many possibilities for confusion there if you are not careful.

2) cell phones or mobile phones are called Handy in German. Handy is pronounced English as well and looks like a English word too if you dismiss the upper case. So a lot of people, even my profs at University have difficulty getting to grips with the fact that no English speaker will understand that a Handy is a cell phone.

3) eventually. That one is tricky for Germans as well. We have the word eventuell in German which means that something might or might not happen. While eventually means that it will definetly (yeah, yeah, I don't know how to write that word) happen. So a lot of people mix that up as well.

Heh, those are all excellent examples. Ueberalles also gets me, as I always think that that should be "Overall". The other classics are "Sechs", "G", "Koch", "Kochin" "Rat" etc.

**Ituralde** · 12-17-2009, 16:52

Originally Posted by Centurio Nixalsverdrus

A German supermarket once advertised a bag for sport clothing as "Bodybag", since "Body" (with y in plural) is "German" for a part of female clothing.

Another one is "aktuell" which means "up to date" in English which we always confuse with "actually" (tatsächlich).

Yeah that second one is a common mistake.

And for the first one. Germans just seem to love using English, but often don't bother to check whether they are using it correctly. Two examples that I just remembered.

1) "Baby an Board" This one is pure genius. I get "Baby on Board" which is the usual English phrase. And I would also understand "Baby an Bord" which would be the German phrase (yeah apparently we have no word for Baby). But mixing them up like that.

2) "World of Accessoires". Once again, Germans use the French word accessoire, while the correct English version would be "World of Accessories".

**The Stranger** · 12-18-2009, 12:07

sounds kinda gay...

**Viking** · 12-18-2009, 22:36

If I compare my language with English, I find alot of conformity.

dei - they
der - there
her - here (similar pronounciation)
da - that

Yet if words of the same meaning are nothing similar, they do rarely look like words of different meaning. The word "gift" is then an exception, since it just as in German means 'poison' in Norwegian.