Aceticon

joined 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (8 children)

I've lived in a couple of European countries and speak 7 different European languages (though my German is kinda crap and my Italian not much better) and regularly take the piss by playing the "ignorant foreigner" with the expressions in other people's languages and acting as if, by translating them literally, I totally misunderstood them.

This works great because there are so many expressions in pretty much all languages which are have entirelly different meanings when interpreted literally but the natives don't really think about it like that because they just learned that stuff as a whole block of meaning rather than having reached it by climb the language-learning ladder from "understanding the words first" as foreigners do.

For example the English expression "I want to pick your brains" which has quite a different and more gruesome meaning if read literally or one the dutch expressions for "you're wasting time in small details" which translates quite literally to "you're fucking ants" and is my all time favorite in all languages I speak well enough to know lots of expressions in.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (16 children)

Remember how the [email protected] mods kept pushing for months the propaganda bot from a pro-Zionist and very rightwing (so much so that their definition of a Rightwing news media was pretty much only the Far-Right ones) organisation trying to tell everybody which news to trust and which to not trust?

Also, curiously and back some months ago when I was making anti-Zionist posts in my Lemmy.world account, all of a sudden I started getting e-mails on the account I used to register on Lemmy.world from an Israeli organisation doing "Education about Israel" courses and they knew not just my e-mail but also the country I lived in (the e-mails were in my native language) even though I didn't share my email on any posts.

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