Once I asked a Chinese colleague who visited my place: "Aren't you cold?" "Yes," he replied. So I shut the window, thinking he was feeling cold. I soon realized that he meant just the opposite as he was almost sweating.

Merry mix-ups when you think local, speak global

When my colleague said "yes", he meant "I confirm the content of your question is right". But for me and other people who speak French, English, Italian or Spanish, the natural answer is "No (I'm not cold)".

Foreign friends who visit China often ask me why the Chinese say "yes" when they mean "no". Being an Italian descendant who grew up in French-speaking Quebec and spent decades in China, I couldn't help noticing the funny misunderstandings when people speak a foreign language while thinking in their mother tongue.

Once I was on a train and a Chinese university lecturer told me a story about his sister and brother-in-law. In oral Chinese, the same pronoun "ta" covers both "he" and "she". As he used both pronouns indifferently in English, I was soon mixed up, jumping from male to female. I could only make out whom he was talking about through verbs such as "to be pregnant" or "to shave his beard".

English speakers of French often find the possessive adjectives hard to remember. In "He gives his salary to his mother", the possessor of both salary and mother is a male speaker. But in French, we'd say "Il donne son (masculine) salaire sa (feminine) mre". In this sense, Chinese is as simple as English in using "ta" to say "he" and "ta de" as "his".

Westerners often find family relationship terms in Chinese the most confusing. The words "guma", "yima" and "jiuma" all mean "aunt", but the first means your father's sister, the second is your mother's sister, and the last is the wife of your mother's brother.

Western people don't seem to bother so much about kinship. In Italian, a single word, "nipote", is used for grandson, granddaughter, nephew and niece (except the gender morphology), indicating a similar relationship with these children irrespective of whether you are their grandparents or their uncle/aunt.
Sometimes, apparently similar expressions are quite different. The Chinese proverb "tianxia wuya yiban hei" (all crows are dark in the world) may sound close to the French idiom "La nuit tous les chats sont gris" (At night all cats are grey). But the first means that villains are bad everywhere in the world; while the second says that in the dark, individual features disappear.

Merry mix-ups when you think local, speak global

Not only confusing, words can also be traitors. On a hotel room door in Spain, a card read "No molestar" (Do not disturb). It made me smile because in French, "molester" means "rough up", while in English, it means "to sexually assault".

Same for tailors offering "alterations" on clothes. No French speaker would dare to go there, as altration strictly means "deterioration". Once, in New-Brunswick, Canada, I saw a bilingual sign: "Do not trespass" and "Ne pas trpasser". The French sentence means "Do not die"!

A Chinese student once told me, in French, that he had "pass son examen". When I asked whether he has succeeded, he was confused that I should ask. In Chinese and English, "tongguo kaoshi" (pass an exam) means to succeed in an exam. But in French, "passer" means "to take", while "russir" is "to pass".

A Spanish pregnant woman is embarazata (embarrassed). When a Chinese is embarrassed, he or she laughs - which is a natural body language in the culture - but laughing at the person whose question one can't answer is a very impolite reaction in Latin cultures.

You see, language is not always communication.