What a jolie girl!
Travelling in France a few years ago, my friend was determined to be more adventurous than me at attempting to speak the language. She spent the first week telling everyone we met how very pretty she was: très jolie! She meant happy!
Editor's note: An easy one to confuse! To say 'I am very happy' use Je suis très content (m) / contente (f) or Je suis très heureux (m) / heureuse (f).
Sent by: Sarah
Comments
Yep, that's really funny. It' really easy to get mixed up. This is because jolie, sounds like what us English use as "jolly".
A few years ago in the South of France, I was trying to explain to Un Gendarme that our car would only be where it was for a few minutes, and did not want to move it as we had 'une grande piece' to put in the back of it. At which point my mother informed me that I had just told the nice officer that I was trying to put a large room in the back of the car, not the large item we had just bought.
I dated a French girl for a while and briefly attempted to learn French. I tried my best to speak the language but mistakes were bound to be made... So one evening after a dinner with some friends I happily proclaimed that one of her female colleagues was très jolie. My intent was to say she was very jolly - instead I ended up with a suspicious girlfriend.
It's probably very very easy to confuse a word like jolie with the English 'jolly', so she was only trying to be sociable among people she had only just met.
When travelling as a student many years ago we found ourselves in Paris. We spotted a cool place to eat, went in and ordered le plat du jour, the dish of the day, which stated amongst other things ±èâ³Ù±ð which I've ordered. The poor waitress looked confused, disappeared only to reappear a while later with plate of pasta. And I thought I get some paté!
It's always useful to have in your repertoire the expression to check if you've said the correct phrase or not. Just add after saying it:
je l'ai dit correctement? They will then inform you whether you're correct or not.
Something similar happened to my girl-friend in the Netherlands. My girl-friend and I lived in the Netherlands for a couple of years and when we moved there we were determined to pick up the language. As a way to meet the locals my girl-friend had started striking up conversations when she went to the gym. As an opener after doing some exercise she would say how tired she was. She used the phrases Ik ben mooi. After a while she wondered why people she spoke to were giving her funny looks. Unfortunately, instead of saying 'I am tired' she had been saying all the time 'I am beautiful'. The phrase she should have used is Ik ben moe.
At the check-in desk at Geneva Airport my dad said to the very helpful man who had handled our baggage: Merci monsieur, vous êtes très joli, thinking he was telling the man he was very helpful. In fact he was saying to him that he was very pretty! It needed a quick intervention from me to reassure him that my dad wasn't coming onto him. He should have used the word gentil, helpful, instead of joli, pretty.
That is hilarious! Good for her for continuing to tell everyone how pretty she was.
When I went to France with young children I thought I would show them my command of the Language. I the Bistro the waiter asked if with would like anything else with our lunch to which I replied "Oui, oussi deux la pan" The waiter looked puzzled ans aske in English "Why two Rabbits". I should have said "du Pain" and not had my ego deflated.
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