Give me your wordplay and obscure culture references, I love them all.
life is like a cucumber, sometime in your hand sometime in your ass. Arabic/Sudanese dialect
el eisha zey el ajoura, mara fi eedak, mara fi teezahk
……
what am i doing with my life 🙈
In Japanese: 春夏冬
It means spring (haru), summer (natsu), winter (fuyu). What’s missing? Autumn. In other words, autumn (aki) is nonexistent (nai), so this is pronounced akinai, which means “not getting tired/bored of something”.A joke in Spanish: ¿Como se dice “autobus” en alemán? “subanstrujenbajen”
Explanation: The question asks how to say “bus” in German. The answer is a form of the words “get on, squeeze, get off” made to look/sound like faux German.
I didn’t know alemán was another way to say “German.” I play early music, and it’s also a type of song known as a “German dance,” so that makes a lot of sense.
The French call Germany “Allemande” as well.
Finland and sweden were having a competition about which language is the most beautiful. Finland was let to choose the sentence and “saari, saari, heinäsaari, heinäsaaren neito”. In swedish its “Ö, ö, hö ö, hö ö mö”
(in english its “island, island, grassy island, grassy island’s maiden”)
Spanish:
–Señor, mi mamá quiere saber qué vende.
–Dile a tu mamá que ceviche.
English:
–Mister, my mom wants to know what are you selling.
–Tell to your mom that ceviche.
Ceviche is, well, ceviche. In north west of México, we often say “vichi” to say “nude”. “vicharse” would be “get naked”, so “Dile a tu mamá que ceviche” can be a pun for “dile a tu mamá que se viche” (Tell to your mom that get naked)
Que le dijo un pez a otro pez?
Nada!What did one fish say to the other? Nothing(/Swim)!
Una estrella estrellada
I get it. The spanish wordt for swimming is “nadar”, which sounds almost the same. Seems like DuoLingo isn’t completely useless after all.
Not a spanish speaker but isn’t ‘nada’ also swim, as in a command to?
Imperative conjugation of nadar is nada
Un león comió jabón. Ahora, es puma/espuma.
¿Que hace el pez?
Nada.
From Danish: You can make a call from Ringsted to Thisted but you can’t pee from Thisted to Ringsted.
For those curious, Ringsted and Thisted are Danish cities. “Ring”, like in English, is the sound a phone makes when you make a call, and in Danish we say that we “ring” someone, when we call them. “This” is pronounced like the Danish word “tis”, which means pee.
Another danish one: How do you make a goldfish laugh?
You put it in spring water.
I hope this isn’t racist as I never thought it was. Best told to an English speaker who only speaks that one language.
A Chinese man is walking down the street and he notices a Chinese friend of his on the other side of the street, walking the opposite way. He yells across the street to his friend “(do fake Chinese talk)”. His friend yells back “(more fake Chinese talk)”. He answers him back with more fake Chinese talk while starting to laugh. He then laughs like a loon as if it is the best joke he’s ever heard.
There is no joke to get but only pretending there was one. Stupid and absurd, I know.
[off topic?]
Yiddish. Does not translate to Christian.
Old man goes to the same lunch counter every day and orders the exact same meal every time. Tuna fish salad on rye toast and tomato soup.
One day he walks in and orders his meal. The waiter brings it.
“Waiter, I want you to try this soup.”
“I’m sorry sir, I’ll get you a different bowl.”
“No, I want you to try this soup!”
“I’ll get the manager.”
“No, I want you to try this soup!”
This goes on for five minutes and finally the waiter gives up.
“Okay, I’ll try the soup. Where’s the spoon?”
“Aha!”
I mean, Christians eat soup, too.
It just comes from cans instead of waiters.
What really translates here for me is how exhausting customers can be.
If the server forgot to bring a spoon you could have just said that five minutes ago while the soup was still hot.
This works better when spoken with the appropriate inflections.
Nu?
I didn’t know this joke had Yiddish origins. Funnily enough, it was told to me by my Jewish grandmother when she was explaining in a convoluted way that I should sweep before mopping 🤣.
One time, between classes we got on the topic of ethnic humor. The guy I told the joke to looked at me like I was insane, but the Russian immigrant woman who overheard it laughed. Someone else told me that Southern US folks would get it.
「野菜を食べやさい！」
I think a close-enough approximation (which isn’t close at all) would be “eat your veggies, peas.”
deleted by creator
>:]
In the garden, there are two chickens.
庭には、鶏が二羽いる。
I almost forgot about that one!
English is squeezing the last scraps of Japanese out of me. :(
5回も誤解した
Hibbedi bobbedi hopfn, jetzt hoats a mal dei Fotzn.
Here’s one which only works if you know BOTH Portuguese and English:
“In Portugal it’s very common for old ladies to go to a coffee place and ask for a big cock”
(Explanation: the Portuguese word for milk with coffee - “galão” - also means “big rooster”. Those are the only two meanings it has in that language. However when you translate it to English you can use a certain synonym for “rooster” which can be read as having another, very different, meaning)
Dutch: Er liep een man in de woestijn en die vond een kameel, maar de kameel vond van niet.
English: A man was walking in the desert and he found a camel, but the camel found he hadn’t.
I don’t know, maybe it works in English too.
I don’t get it, and I speak Dutch…
Well, OP didn’t specify good jokes…
Sorry, can’t help you there. There’s nothing less funny than explaining jokes, except maybe this joke…
Spanish wordplay: ¿Por qué está feliz la escoba? Porque siempre barriendo.
Translation: Why is the broom happy? Because it’s always sweeping (barriendo = sweeping, sounds like va riendo = goes around laughing)
El pan está blando ¿Y qué dice?
Oye, esa oración no tiene sen—ooooooh. 🙈
“Was ist der Unterschied zwischen Schach und Billard?” - “Beim Schach hat man den Kö nich.”
“What’s the difference between chess and billiards?” - Answer is a pun, can mean both “You have the king.” and “You don’t have the cue.” Doesn’t translate at all.
