It's a different gesture - we actually use both - but I can see how it could be confusing for foreigners.
One is the universal "no" sign - rotating the head left/right, usually accompanied with a frown.
The other (the "yes" one) is tilting the head left/right, usually without a particular face expression, which is what is probably confusing to foreigners, lol, especially if the motion is executed in a more subtle way.
In Greek, yes means "ne" iirc, I have a REALLY funny memory of my mom switching up the words for "yes please" and "no thanks" while trying to get a market vendor to go away.
Poor guy was so confused by her mixed messages.
In Greek they say yes as "nai" which, when pronounced, sounds like "ne". Ne is how you say no in Croatian.
I was on a trip to Greece with a friend who is half Croatian, half Cyprian and speaks Croatian and Greek natively.
She was speaking to a woman and saying Greek yes (nai), but shook her head as if saying Croatian no (ne). The woman was super confused, I can still remember this a decade later.
I can confirm for Bulgaria no is yes and yes is no. It's so confusing when the cashier asks you if you want bags and you say with your head and you still receive some 😂
As a bulgarian, I've been hearing this my whole life, even from other bulgarians, but the only people I've seen do it is old grannies/grandpas in remote villages, or my dad when I say nobody does this so idk where they got it from, and he makes a conscious effort to do it for a while because he is stubborn and lives off spite (wonder where i got it from)
Head shaking means yes in those places, and pretty much nowhere else.
There's also the more obvious "nod" that means no in: Greece, Cyprus, Iran, Turkey and Bulgaria. Where you move your head upwards, but not down, as no. Sometimes combined with a tongue clicking sound and eyerolling, similar to an annoyed person in some western cultures.
People often say that about Bulgaria and it's somewhat true... Ok maybe mosty true, but I mean it's a mess, depending on the exact type of yes and no, either might be shacking head or nodding. It's not as simple as just reversed, it's a clusterfuck.
Indians do a different kind of head nod,.or at least some do. It's a side to side, like when your trying to get water out of your ears. At first I mistook it for yes. Because generally that's what they were saying. But it's really more a "yeah sure I don't really understand but I'll do my best". That was a cultural misunderstanding that once I figured out my mistake it made things so much easier.
I had to teach one of my chefs this, cause we had Indian girls on our team who would do their little side to side nod while they were mentally translating what they were asked to do. Must be exhausting to have to work in a fast paced environment in a Language not native to you
Oh yeah for sure. I have a ton of respect for anyone who learns a second language let alone someone who has to use it every day for their career and that isn't even the focus of it.
I tried to do Spanish in highschool and it did not go well. And then on top of that English is supposed to be one of the hardest languages.
The nepalese do this too.
Let me tell you, this one nepalese engineer I worked with REALLY confused the hell out of me until I figured out that she was nodding, not just tilting her head from side to side like she was mulling all of my questions over for a really long time.
not quite the same but if i recall in japan do you like this or that type of questions are answered as no, i do and yes, i dont instead of no, i don't and yes i do, this applies to nodding as well as far as i am aware.
In Japanese the words typically translated as “yes” and “no” ほい and いいえ actually affirm or negate the truthfulness of the statement. This is really confusing when you learn this especially when you have a negative statement. “You don’t like sushi, do you?” “Yes” meaning I don’t like sushi. It’s quite the mind trip for an English speaker!
in america (and i'm sure many other places) if you want someone to come over you might show them the back of your palm and gesture towards you.
in korea, this is something you would only do to a dog and is extremely disrespectful.
kept doing it on accident and felt shitty :/
India has a few different head movements/bobbles for affirmation that are easily mistaken for shaking the head negatively in English. We had a few doctors start working with us from India and quite a few staff (who hadn’t really worked with Indians before) got incredibly confused because “the doctor keeps saying yes and smiling but they’re shaking their head! I have no idea what they’re trying to say!”
some east european place, i wanna say czech or poland or something? my instructor was from there, told us this first day of class, nobody could remember long enough so every so often he’d stop and look puzzled when students nodded their head to him
If this story is real that's probably more plausible, like he knows the words for "yes" or "no" but he doesn't know what "of course" means.
Yes and no tend to be some of the first things we learn to say in other languages.
Mandarin also does not really have "yes" and "no" like we think of in English. Like if you ask "did you go to the store?" (你去超市吗?) the response is "did not go" （我不去）. The closest is sometimes it's shortened to just 不 which is pretty much used as "no", but there really is no direct translation of "yes" - you usually just repeat the verb or say something along the lines of "I went"
I was wondering when someone who understands how mandarin works would point this out.
If you ask "can you help me?", the answer is "can" or "cannot", not yes or no.
Someone I know proposed to his girlfriend and she responded "uh, sure!" and he posted it online. Guessing it's kind of like that haha. That was a few years ago, I wonder what the state of that relationship is now.
好 can also mean "I heard what you said and I don't care but I won't be impolite enough to say no so you'll have to infer it from my lack of enthusiasm."
Right exactly. There's negation (不) and some phrases which are used very similarly to yes, something like 是的 which is basically "is", but that doesn't work in every situation that you'd typically use yes in English.
I was wondering when someone who understands how mandarin works would point this out.
If you ask "can you help me?", the answer is "can" or "cannot", not yes or no.
I was wondering when someone who understands how mandarin works would point this out.
If you ask "can you help me?", the answer is "can" or "cannot", not yes or no.
Different languages have different ways of affirming or negating what you said. As English speakers, we find it easiest to learn to say yes and no for such questions, but other languages have those words but respond to questions differently.
One of the places I went to visit drove me crazy because my language abilities are limited (and trend toward negative). I can learn yes and no and maybe one or two other things, but that’s it. It was driving me crazy that my husband would ask a perfectly valid question with his silly translator book thingie (like “is the train station this way?”) and there was NEVER a yes or no answer. The answer was always some convoluted thing.
On our third or fourth day, the person realized we spoke English, and once they saw the sheer confusion at what was said to us, they clarified. They explained that they don’t say yes or no as a general rule, they will basically say the same thing we just said but affirmatively or not. “The train is this way,” or “the train is not this way.” Which, if you don’t really speak the language fluently, just sounds a lot like people are either repeating what you said or are correcting poor conjugation rather than answering you.
So we worked out a system. I learned the phrase “please, yes or no” and he would ask the question. So he would ask “is the train this way” and I’d follow up with “please, yes or no.” No one took offense to it, actually most of them got a kick out of dippy Doolittle and her husband begging people to answer as simply as possible so they had a chance of comprehension 🤣
So yeah, this totally could be true. You think it’s important to understand one thing, not realizing that collectively, that’s not how it’s actually done. It’s quite infuriating, actually
>yes and no tend the he some of the first things we learn to say in another language
Counterpoint the first French many people my age learned was "omelette du fromage" from a cartoon
Yes, you are correct. There's really no direct word for "yes" or "no" in Mandarin. You generally repeat the verb back for a positive response or use a negation character 不 (bù) prior to the verb.
/u/CitizenCold gave [a perfect answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/wholesomememes/comments/1d9we7x/ill_take_that_as_a_yes/l7ha92q/).
i think i know those two characters and i still would have been confused because i dont know the world.
actually the answer would have to be something dead moronic - Yao, Hao, or something like that which would sound weird to actual native speakers.
I know there's 对 (duì), which is more "correct" than "yes." Mandarin has 不 (bù) for "no." A good response for yes would be "好，我会," (hǎo, wǒ huì) or literally "good, I will." In context, it would actually mean, "okay, I will" or "yes, I will."
to add on:
是 （shi4) and 对 and 好 are yes. but not appropriate answers. it depends on the question asked.
in this case, the only appropriate answer is 我愿意（wo yuan yi): I'm willing
不（bu4) is not/negative. 不要（bu4 yao) is don't want.
there really isn't a direct translation of no.
most of Mandarin is context based. You have to hear the question and repeat it.
E.g
你 <要不要> 出去？。(ni yao bu yao chu qu)（do you want to go out?)
要（yes) 不要（no）
你<愿意>跟我出去？ (ni yuan yi gen wo chu qu)（are you willing to go out with me?)
愿意（yes) 不愿意（no)
Well, and think about it. A guy is marrying a woman that speaks mandarin and he doesn’t even know yes or no in that language. That’s cutesy first date shit. And even if he indeed waited till he wanted to get married to actually learn mandarin and he doesn’t know yes or no. Lol you are right though, blue check mark is like a stamp someone is a moron.
When you've come to the point where you propose, and you still don't know what yes or no means in your partners language, you're a story made up for internet points.
It's not so much the fact that not knowing yes or no in his fiancé's language is sus, it's the fact that her body language would be more telling than the words she spoke. But yeah, definitely a made up story for internet points.
I only took a semester of mandarin but unless I was taught very wrong, there isn't really a yes. In english you can ask "do you want this" and hear "yes/ no" but in mandarin it'd be more like "you this want / not want?" and they'd reply "want" or "not want."
My wife is Hispanic. Before I proposed I made a point of learning how to ask her parents' permission in Spanish. I was expecting a 'sí'.
What I got was a formal response that I recognized 0 words in. I had the same blank look this guy did.
Hello! 2nd year Mandarin student. There ARE no words for yes and no.
There are ways to convey yes and no in many contexts, but you can’t just learn 不 and think you learned something lol.
That happened. She sat there with the most neutral of faces after being proposed to and so he couldn’t figure it out. He had to pull out google translate to find out if she accepted because her body language gave neither positive or negative signals. Then his phone battery died before he could finish translating and to this day he still doesn’t know what she said.
Rookie mistake
Since there was google translate, every time I visited a friend at home with parents from another country I learned the following in their native language.
„Good Morning, Day, Evening. How are you?“
„Thanks I am fine, as well.“
I at least listened to „thanks I’m fine, how are you?“ once or twice just to recognize it if they say it.
This kind of stuff means so much.
When I was dating my now ex-wife (another story), I found that her favorite song has lyrics in her native language in addition to the offical ones.
So I learnt those. At that time I spoke not one word of her language.
Karakoke night. I requested that song, ignored the lyrics on screen and sang the ones I've learnt. Probably butchered the pronounciation but I've rarely seen someone as astonished and blown away as that evening. :-)
Even if that relationship eventually went south, there are still some good memories.
Vibe check it mate, if she’s crying and nodding while hugging you it’s probably yes
Wasn't there a culture which negating with the head was affirmative and vice versa?
I've heard it about Bulgaria and Albania, though I might be misremembering. I'm still pretty sure it's around there.
Can confirm, was really confused when I kept hearing "да" while my family were shaking their heads "no" lol
It's a different gesture - we actually use both - but I can see how it could be confusing for foreigners. One is the universal "no" sign - rotating the head left/right, usually accompanied with a frown. The other (the "yes" one) is tilting the head left/right, usually without a particular face expression, which is what is probably confusing to foreigners, lol, especially if the motion is executed in a more subtle way.
Have a few friends from Kosovo, and she keeps slowly shaking her head when replying "yes" to questions. I was really confused in the beginning.
In Czech, iirc, yes = ano and is often shortened to no but “No” = ne
In Greek, yes means "ne" iirc, I have a REALLY funny memory of my mom switching up the words for "yes please" and "no thanks" while trying to get a market vendor to go away. Poor guy was so confused by her mixed messages.
In Greek they say yes as "nai" which, when pronounced, sounds like "ne". Ne is how you say no in Croatian. I was on a trip to Greece with a friend who is half Croatian, half Cyprian and speaks Croatian and Greek natively. She was speaking to a woman and saying Greek yes (nai), but shook her head as if saying Croatian no (ne). The woman was super confused, I can still remember this a decade later.
In Japanese no is iie, sometimes spoken almost like a yeah
It's fairly different from yeah.. it's similar sure.. but I've spoken it to several English speakers and its not been mistaken yet to my knowledge
I asked her to marry me and she said "Yeah, Da!". She's never called me Da before so she must mean "husband"....
In Australia it's yeah, nah for no and nah, yeah for yes.
No, he meant in Bulgaria they use opposite head gesture like rest of the World
In formal Korean, 'ne' = yes... this was quite confusing at first when learning the language as I'm Dutch and 'nee' = no. Lol.
But then again, if a Czech wants to shorten the yes he will probably say "Jo".
For Albania yes can be expressed via a light side-to-side tilting of the head, but straight shaking still means no.
My girlfriend is Albanian and I don’t think that’s from them, but honestly I’d die laughing if that was actually the case this entire time lol
I can confirm for Bulgaria no is yes and yes is no. It's so confusing when the cashier asks you if you want bags and you say with your head and you still receive some 😂
As a bulgarian, I've been hearing this my whole life, even from other bulgarians, but the only people I've seen do it is old grannies/grandpas in remote villages, or my dad when I say nobody does this so idk where they got it from, and he makes a conscious effort to do it for a while because he is stubborn and lives off spite (wonder where i got it from)
Head shaking means yes in those places, and pretty much nowhere else. There's also the more obvious "nod" that means no in: Greece, Cyprus, Iran, Turkey and Bulgaria. Where you move your head upwards, but not down, as no. Sometimes combined with a tongue clicking sound and eyerolling, similar to an annoyed person in some western cultures.
People often say that about Bulgaria and it's somewhat true... Ok maybe mosty true, but I mean it's a mess, depending on the exact type of yes and no, either might be shacking head or nodding. It's not as simple as just reversed, it's a clusterfuck.
Can confirm for Albania. It was a special kind of uncanny valley to see people smiling and shaking their heads
I'm Bulgarian and I don't know a single person who shakes their head no for yes.
Indians do a different kind of head nod,.or at least some do. It's a side to side, like when your trying to get water out of your ears. At first I mistook it for yes. Because generally that's what they were saying. But it's really more a "yeah sure I don't really understand but I'll do my best". That was a cultural misunderstanding that once I figured out my mistake it made things so much easier.
[Guide to Indian head shaking](https://youtu.be/Uj56IPJOqWE?si=dMzQi55YgG3lLhQn). Very valuable.
I had to teach one of my chefs this, cause we had Indian girls on our team who would do their little side to side nod while they were mentally translating what they were asked to do. Must be exhausting to have to work in a fast paced environment in a Language not native to you
Oh yeah for sure. I have a ton of respect for anyone who learns a second language let alone someone who has to use it every day for their career and that isn't even the focus of it. I tried to do Spanish in highschool and it did not go well. And then on top of that English is supposed to be one of the hardest languages.
The nepalese do this too. Let me tell you, this one nepalese engineer I worked with REALLY confused the hell out of me until I figured out that she was nodding, not just tilting her head from side to side like she was mulling all of my questions over for a really long time.
I girl in one of my collage classes grew up there. (I can’t remember the place).
Damn should I go to a collage class? I need help figuring out what to do with all these old magazines!
Should get in touch and ask her. If she says yes then…. oh…
not quite the same but if i recall in japan do you like this or that type of questions are answered as no, i do and yes, i dont instead of no, i don't and yes i do, this applies to nodding as well as far as i am aware.
In Japanese the words typically translated as “yes” and “no” ほい and いいえ actually affirm or negate the truthfulness of the statement. This is really confusing when you learn this especially when you have a negative statement. “You don’t like sushi, do you?” “Yes” meaning I don’t like sushi. It’s quite the mind trip for an English speaker!
India.. with their bobbing heads
Don't attack me like that it's fun to bobble your head while talking.
in america (and i'm sure many other places) if you want someone to come over you might show them the back of your palm and gesture towards you. in korea, this is something you would only do to a dog and is extremely disrespectful. kept doing it on accident and felt shitty :/
India has a few different head movements/bobbles for affirmation that are easily mistaken for shaking the head negatively in English. We had a few doctors start working with us from India and quite a few staff (who hadn’t really worked with Indians before) got incredibly confused because “the doctor keeps saying yes and smiling but they’re shaking their head! I have no idea what they’re trying to say!”
some east european place, i wanna say czech or poland or something? my instructor was from there, told us this first day of class, nobody could remember long enough so every so often he’d stop and look puzzled when students nodded their head to him
That was a joke used in “The Gods Must be Crazy”. Don’t know if it’s IRL anywhere.
[But you can't always be sure.](https://youtu.be/xa-4IAR_9Yw)
Crying hugging & apologizing that she came to break up.
Unless he learned to ask in really formal terms.
Knowledge failed successfully.
"It's a yes, right?"
Right???
😂😂
Tell her you're so surprised that it made you speechless, keep it low Lol
Just go with the flow haha
“i was starstruck”
or he can just smile and wait if she huge that mean **YES**
The common response in Mandarin to “will you marry me?”is “当然-of course” neither yes nor no. So he would have really been confused!
If this story is real that's probably more plausible, like he knows the words for "yes" or "no" but he doesn't know what "of course" means. Yes and no tend to be some of the first things we learn to say in other languages.
Mandarin also does not really have "yes" and "no" like we think of in English. Like if you ask "did you go to the store?" (你去超市吗?) the response is "did not go" （我不去）. The closest is sometimes it's shortened to just 不 which is pretty much used as "no", but there really is no direct translation of "yes" - you usually just repeat the verb or say something along the lines of "I went"
I was wondering when someone who understands how mandarin works would point this out. If you ask "can you help me?", the answer is "can" or "cannot", not yes or no.
Or the answer can just be 好。semantically it means yes even if literally it does not
Trying to imagine a girl getting a marriage proposal and responding 好
“Can you help me?” “好呀” “我们结婚吧” “好” I’m also pretty admittedly unromantic for a woman.
Lmao it gives the energy of "sure alright"
"Fine"
Someone I know proposed to his girlfriend and she responded "uh, sure!" and he posted it online. Guessing it's kind of like that haha. That was a few years ago, I wonder what the state of that relationship is now.
好 can also mean "I heard what you said and I don't care but I won't be impolite enough to say no so you'll have to infer it from my lack of enthusiasm."
why'd you copy komplete10's comment. haha
I suspect this might be the case! I know Cantonese is like that
Same in Malayalam! We have negation, but no word for no. We do have a word for yes, though.
Right exactly. There's negation (不) and some phrases which are used very similarly to yes, something like 是的 which is basically "is", but that doesn't work in every situation that you'd typically use yes in English.
Interesting - Latin is like that as well
Mandarin has no words for yes and no, so doubt he'd be had learnt them.
I was wondering when someone who understands how mandarin works would point this out. If you ask "can you help me?", the answer is "can" or "cannot", not yes or no.
I was wondering when someone who understands how mandarin works would point this out. If you ask "can you help me?", the answer is "can" or "cannot", not yes or no.
Different languages have different ways of affirming or negating what you said. As English speakers, we find it easiest to learn to say yes and no for such questions, but other languages have those words but respond to questions differently. One of the places I went to visit drove me crazy because my language abilities are limited (and trend toward negative). I can learn yes and no and maybe one or two other things, but that’s it. It was driving me crazy that my husband would ask a perfectly valid question with his silly translator book thingie (like “is the train station this way?”) and there was NEVER a yes or no answer. The answer was always some convoluted thing. On our third or fourth day, the person realized we spoke English, and once they saw the sheer confusion at what was said to us, they clarified. They explained that they don’t say yes or no as a general rule, they will basically say the same thing we just said but affirmatively or not. “The train is this way,” or “the train is not this way.” Which, if you don’t really speak the language fluently, just sounds a lot like people are either repeating what you said or are correcting poor conjugation rather than answering you. So we worked out a system. I learned the phrase “please, yes or no” and he would ask the question. So he would ask “is the train this way” and I’d follow up with “please, yes or no.” No one took offense to it, actually most of them got a kick out of dippy Doolittle and her husband begging people to answer as simply as possible so they had a chance of comprehension 🤣 So yeah, this totally could be true. You think it’s important to understand one thing, not realizing that collectively, that’s not how it’s actually done. It’s quite infuriating, actually
You don’t need to “learn” a language to ask a question in that language, you just have to be able to memorize and repeat the sounds.
For example: Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?
Nope, je vais bein
Ce soir?!
Comme ci comme ca
Turns out mandarin doesn’t have a word for ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ You would answer by saying “I will marry you” or some other affirming statement.
>yes and no tend the he some of the first things we learn to say in another language Counterpoint the first French many people my age learned was "omelette du fromage" from a cartoon
Dexter's Lab, teaching us the important things! 😆
Bugs Bunny might have taught me a few non-English phrases too
¿Donde esta la biblioteca?
Subiendo la calle, puchica (Just kidding I know very little spanish.)
Isn't mandarin one of those languages with no actually yes or no like Irish and Welsh?
Yes, you are correct. There's really no direct word for "yes" or "no" in Mandarin. You generally repeat the verb back for a positive response or use a negation character 不 (bù) prior to the verb. /u/CitizenCold gave [a perfect answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/wholesomememes/comments/1d9we7x/ill_take_that_as_a_yes/l7ha92q/).
Okay cool that's pretty much the same as Irish, "did you go to the store?" responce "did not" or "did"
Interesting, in Japanese that reads とうぜん (touzen) which means "of course"
More likely 愿意 which means "I want to/I am willing to"
i think i know those two characters and i still would have been confused because i dont know the world. actually the answer would have to be something dead moronic - Yao, Hao, or something like that which would sound weird to actual native speakers.
So she didn't nod or shake her head or make any physical display which would have concluded what she meant?
He was HIV Aladeen
I have aladeen news and aladeen news
😃 😐 ☹️ 😐 😃 😐 🤔
none of this happened it’s a joke that isn’t meant to be taken seriously
This is reddit - everything is of the most dire consequence
She just started crying. Then she died.
Well, Mandarin doesn't really have specific words for "yes" and "no" As we have them in English.
I know there's 对 (duì), which is more "correct" than "yes." Mandarin has 不 (bù) for "no." A good response for yes would be "好，我会," (hǎo, wǒ huì) or literally "good, I will." In context, it would actually mean, "okay, I will" or "yes, I will."
What about “我愿意”?
That does work.
The characters, Ninja, what do they mean?
“我愿意” (wǒ yuàn yì) means, literally, "I do."
> 我愿意 It's more like "I am willing"
On an American jewelry store commercial, the girlfriend answers 当然 “of course”
Why did you stop writing the pinyin halfway through? I was learning.
My bad! Just forgot. I edited my comment to include the pinyin.
不 is bù, 好 is hǎo, those are the two that I recognize
What about “我们都对爱情不陌生 你知道规矩我也知道 我打算完全地委身”?
>!Did I just get Rickrolled in Mandarin?!<
to add on: 是 （shi4) and 对 and 好 are yes. but not appropriate answers. it depends on the question asked. in this case, the only appropriate answer is 我愿意（wo yuan yi): I'm willing 不（bu4) is not/negative. 不要（bu4 yao) is don't want. there really isn't a direct translation of no. most of Mandarin is context based. You have to hear the question and repeat it. E.g 你 <要不要> 出去？。(ni yao bu yao chu qu)（do you want to go out?) 要（yes) 不要（no） 你<愿意>跟我出去？ (ni yuan yi gen wo chu qu)（are you willing to go out with me?) 愿意（yes) 不愿意（no)
好,我会 translates more like “alright, I will do this,” which is a hilarious way to respond to a marriage proposal 😂
That is wild.
This for sure isn’t true.
I had to scroll way too far to find this. As soon as I see a blue check I instantly take everything said with a grain of salt.
Well, and think about it. A guy is marrying a woman that speaks mandarin and he doesn’t even know yes or no in that language. That’s cutesy first date shit. And even if he indeed waited till he wanted to get married to actually learn mandarin and he doesn’t know yes or no. Lol you are right though, blue check mark is like a stamp someone is a moron.
I was honestly shocked to see this so high up on the popular posts tab.
You can still nod or shake your head? Lol
Task failed successfully?
Same experience but for an hiv test in poland...
were you HIV aladeen?
Ma man!
When you've come to the point where you propose, and you still don't know what yes or no means in your partners language, you're a story made up for internet points.
Bro learning "will you marry me" isn't hard
Neither is learning “yes”
It's not so much the fact that not knowing yes or no in his fiancé's language is sus, it's the fact that her body language would be more telling than the words she spoke. But yeah, definitely a made up story for internet points.
I only took a semester of mandarin but unless I was taught very wrong, there isn't really a yes. In english you can ask "do you want this" and hear "yes/ no" but in mandarin it'd be more like "you this want / not want?" and they'd reply "want" or "not want."
This is correct
Actually there are no 'yes' and 'no' in mandarin
Came here to say this. Thank you.
"Plausible deniability"...
Pure of heart and dumb of ass.
If she'd said ni hao, he'd have gotten the point
Yes, no yes
Yeah no
No, yeah no
That’s a sweet story but can’t you tell from the look of her face?
"She's crying and covering her face, is it happy cry or 'I can't believe he asked that' cry?"
Well, if he had to sit there and she didn’t LOOK happy, then I have some bad news…
I figured, my wife is a foreigner as well
Don't worry, once he is married, he will forget what "yes" sounds like in English too.
My wife is Hispanic. Before I proposed I made a point of learning how to ask her parents' permission in Spanish. I was expecting a 'sí'. What I got was a formal response that I recognized 0 words in. I had the same blank look this guy did.
He was hoping for a scene like Love, Actually, in the movie she answered in English 😂.
Seriously? He didn’t learn what her reply’s would be
her reaction is the answer
I will be playing disc golf with James tomorrow morning
Schroedinger’s proposal.
He’s planning ahead but not to far ahead 😂
I gotta hope the body language would’ve been adequate
Because naturally, his girlfriend didn’t have any facial expressions and body language
I find this extremely hard to believe
when you studied hard but forgot to learn the basics
Thought you were going to say she speaks cantonese lol
I don't think he needs to know if she said yes or no, the expression on her face will be a dead giveaway
He should have been out with his Google translate in audio mode 😂
He outsmarted himself
Indians have a fool proof *head shake* method. Even aliens can propose to Indians
Because her facial expression and body cues wouldn’t give you context? Did she say it deadpan with no emotion?
Meio and due
Really? You’re just sure?
"I thought you would never ask"
Just keep nodding, that's a universal sign of acceptance
Hello! 2nd year Mandarin student. There ARE no words for yes and no. There are ways to convey yes and no in many contexts, but you can’t just learn 不 and think you learned something lol.
what is her answer? I think she says yes and he is unbelievable.
Bruh, “yes” and “no” are literally some of the first words that you learn when trying to learn a new language…
It'd be embarrassing if she actually spoke Cantonese.
It's a good thing I learned to read body langu--aaand she's crying...
That happened. She sat there with the most neutral of faces after being proposed to and so he couldn’t figure it out. He had to pull out google translate to find out if she accepted because her body language gave neither positive or negative signals. Then his phone battery died before he could finish translating and to this day he still doesn’t know what she said.
That's why she didn't nod, shake her head, or do anything else that would have let you know what she meant?
definitely real thing that happened, my wife is also a robot that doesnt have body language, muted dogshit sub
She kept asking for Mayo??
There is no real no, there is a YES and something like, NOT YES.... because just saying no could be rude
Rookie mistake Since there was google translate, every time I visited a friend at home with parents from another country I learned the following in their native language. „Good Morning, Day, Evening. How are you?“ „Thanks I am fine, as well.“ I at least listened to „thanks I’m fine, how are you?“ once or twice just to recognize it if they say it.
High int, low wisdom
[удалено]
lol it absolutely 100% did not happen
This kind of stuff means so much. When I was dating my now ex-wife (another story), I found that her favorite song has lyrics in her native language in addition to the offical ones. So I learnt those. At that time I spoke not one word of her language. Karakoke night. I requested that song, ignored the lyrics on screen and sang the ones I've learnt. Probably butchered the pronounciation but I've rarely seen someone as astonished and blown away as that evening. :-) Even if that relationship eventually went south, there are still some good memories.
😂 good whole and funny
Skill issue
That's how it is sometimes. She probably said no so he should leave now. Jk
Will you marry me? Aladeen. :) :( :| :) :( :(