Martina, Take This Lamb...

A few years ago we were visiting my family in Sardinia. It was summer, and we had spent the day at the beach. Before heading back home Phil (hubby) decided to open our fridge-bag and offer our daughter and me a cool drink.

He likes to practise his Italian when we’re visiting, so he turned to her and said:

“Cosa vuoi bere? Succo di pesce?”

She looked at him with the most disgusted expression a young girl could have.

I burst into laughter and said: “Succo di pesca, non di pesce!”

Peach juice, not fish juice!

To this day, every time I see a lovely glass full of succo di pesca, I can’t help but think of a fish.

It is actually very common when you learn a new language to encounter these mishaps. Some words are so similar that your brain just grabs the wrong one.

It happens to me with the English language too. The words kitchen and chicken sound so similar in my head, that I often get them wrong, even after living in the UK for two decades!

I’ve been known to tell Phil:

“I forgot to put the kitchen in the oven.”

He just smiles. He knows I mean chicken, and sometimes I haven’t even realised what I’ve said.

But the biggest struggle I have, as an Italian, is pronouncing English words that begin with an H. Because in Italian the H is silent, so I’m just not used to making that funny H sound. You’d think this would just be a minor pronunciation quirk, but it actually leads to some pretty amusing misunderstandings.

We have two friends here in the UK: Anna and Hannah. They are two distinct persons: Anna is a maths tutor, married with two kids and lives near us. Hannah runs her own business, is single and lives in another county.

One evening, Phil and I went for a walk, and I started telling him about how Hannah’s car had broken down in the middle of the night. She had to call for roadside assistance, eventually got rescued and was dropped off at home, only to realise, after the guy had driven off, that she’d left her house keys in the rescue van.

So, for a good 20 minutes I’m telling Phil what hard time Hannah had had.

And he keeps asking odd questions, such as the actual whereabouts of the car breakdown, whether someone at home had spare keys… It’s only when he asked why she didn’t call her husband that I twigged: he thought I was talking about Anna, not Hannah!

Aaaarrgggh! How many full conversations have we had talking at cross purposes!

So we had the usual exchange:

Phil: you said Anna.

Me: I said Hannah; but to me Anna and Hannah sound the same.

Phil: No they don’t.

Me: OK maybe a little different.

Phil: Very different.

Me: Like carne and cane?

Phil: You know I’m not good at rolling my Rs…

So we laughed it off. For me, kitchen and chicken are easily swappable. For Phil it’s carne and cane (meat and dog).

And then there was anello (ring) and agnello (lamb), two words that caused a fair bit of confusion in the lead-up to our wedding.

We got married in Italy, and had to say our vows in Italian. Before the ceremony, we practised together: Phil would hold my hand and say the words while giving me the ring.

Except he kept saying:

“Martina, prendi questo agnello…”

(Martina, take this lamb…)

I remember standing at the altar thinking: “Please let him get it right this time. How am I going to keep a straight face if he offers me a lamb in front of everyone?”

These are the moments that make language learning so much fun.

We shouldn’t feel embarrassed when we say the wrong word or trip over our pronunciation. It happens to everyone, including those of us who’ve been speaking another language for decades.

And sometimes the mistakes become the stories you remember years later.

All these sound-alike words gave me the idea for Parole italiane simili, an online Italian word search full of words that look or sound remarkably similar but mean completely different things. See how many you can tell apart.