So yesterday I had lunch with a friend of mine who is fluent in French and incidentally a couple of her French speaking friends. It started off as a nice meeting, I love meeting new people, especially if they're from a different culture than me. As the lunch went along everyone would use little French phrases which I would totally pretend to understand while in my head I'd be freaking out, not knowing what I had just nodded in agreement to. For all I know Sexy-French-Ben-With-The-Stubble (also known as Ben to his friends), could have been saying how he thought right-wing politics was the way forwards and animal testing was completely justified.
Now as a wannabe French speaker I naturally wanted to impress these people and show off the little French I remembered. The problem was I couldn't remember a single French phrase that would be appropriate so I thought to myself, "hey, you know how to conjugate verbs, you know how to say I am. Come on brain, whisk me up a phrase. How hard can it be to get three words wrong?"
Oh you are about to find out where it all went wrong.
Sexy-French-Ben-With-The-Stubble was going to order a dessert of some kind and asked us all, "does anyone else want anything?". Then the ego monster rose in my chest, oh so eager to impress Sexy-French-Ben-With-The-Stubble and show them that I too could speak a little French. So the words "non merci, je suis plein" escaped from my lips.
Let me go through that with those who do not understand what just happened. Naturally I wanted to say, "no thank you, I'm full" in French. I am, would translate to je suis, and the verb full would be conjugated to plein. Which I thought was correct at the time.
Then everyone kind of froze and looked at me suppressing smirks, understanding my intended sentence, and Sexy-French-Ben-With-The-Stubble just shared a small chuckle with his friend and smiled politely at me. Knowing I must have said something wrong I pulled my friend aside after and asked her why they were all laughing, and it was then she told me that "je suis plein" often meant "I am knocked up" in English.
Yes, "je suis plein" = slang for "I am knocked up".
I looked it up later and it can also mean "I am drunk".
Great. Sexy-French-Ben-With-The-Stubble will never look at me in the same way again. They all understood my mistake and what I actually meant to say but it was still a little embarrassing.
Naturally I looked up other phrases which don't mean quite what you intend them to mean in French. Here are a few if you, like me, are a self-embarrassing French speaker:
- Je suis chaud - I am hot (expected meaning) - I am horny/warming up for something (actual meaning) - J'ai chaud (what you should say instead)
- Je suis fini - I am finished (expected meaning) - I am dead (actual meaning) - J'ai fini (what you should say instead, I HAVE finished)
Here are a list of other words in which you should use the verb avoir, because as per usual, there are some exceptions to the "je suis". http://french.about.com/od/expressions/a/avoir.htm
I have some others too but I think I shall build them up and make a new post some other time when I have enough mistakes. Hopefully I won't find these mistakes the way I found out this one and embarrass myself in front of Sexy-French-Ben-With-The-Stubble.
Salut
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