I learned of this video on some blog or similar marketing article written by Speaking World in Stornoway – even though Speaking World don’t actually offer any foreign language classes themselves (any more than I do). The stand-out phrase of this video is “should have taken a foreign language class”. I suppose that, on some level, the video is supposed to be funny, but is that phrase really valid? If the guy had never taken any foreign language classes, he wouldn’t have been able to speak the foreign languages at all, right?
Mind you, I speak very good German, and with the German one it could be argued that he could only have hoped to know the shocking truth about what he seemed to be implying to the German guy and girl if he had taken a proper foreign language class in German (and it would probably be imperative that the teacher be a native speaker of German, given that relatively few non-native German speakers are aware of things like that; as it is with every language).
Meanwhile, I don’t speak Spanish or Chinese – well, not enough to “get by” at even a very basic level, even though I’m sure I could learn both, and both at once if I had to. But I was able to use a machine translation tool to find out what the guy meant to say and what he really seemed to say for the Spanish one and the Chinese one.
For the Spanish one, he attempts a “Spanishised” pronunciation of “Colgate”; I was able to determine that what he appeared to say here was “ahorcarse” – interesting that someone out there was able to compare the elocution of “ahorcarse” to that of the apparent (if obviously contrived) “Spanishised” pronunciation of “Colgate”. We don’t really see him attempting to communicate in Spanish, and maybe he would have known what Spanish for “Go and hang yourself” is had he taken a Spanish class; so I guess “should have taken a foreign language class” is perfectly valid there
But I can’t really relate “should have taken a foreign language class” to the Chinese one. It’s clear that he can speak Chinese, and the only mistake he makes there is an innocent mispronunciation where the suggested message is not so much offensive outright as it is weird, if in an irrefutably impolite kind of way. …Yeah? I mean: “Be careful to be naked?” What do you say to something like that? If someone said that to you, wouldn’t you basically find yourself unable to believe the statement, while being torn between feeling amused and feeling embarrassed or shocked? Unless of course, the Chinese couple took it more as like, “Make sure that you are/will be naked.” It is not specifically mentioned whether or not the Chinese guy and girl are close (compare this to the German one, where the German guy, given the interpretation he places on “Kann ich deine Freundin haben?”, does not try to deny that the girl is his girlfriend) but I think that the viewer is expected to accept that they are (i.e. when the Chinese guy throws a punch), or is that just me? But even if it is “just me”, I believe that it is possible to parallel that with general differing views/appreciations of the world that are recognised with different cultures, do you know what I mean?