I've lived in a couple of European countries and speak 7 different European languages (though my German is kinda crap and my Italian not much better) and regularly take the piss by playing the "ignorant foreigner" with the expressions in other people's languages and acting as if, by translating them literally, I totally misunderstood them.
This works great because there are so many expressions in pretty much all languages which are have entirelly different meanings when interpreted literally but the natives don't really think about it like that because they just learned that stuff as a whole block of meaning rather than having reached it by climb the language-learning ladder from "understanding the words first" as foreigners do.
For example the English expression "I want to pick your brains" which has quite a different and more gruesome meaning if read literally or one the dutch expressions for "you're wasting time in small details" which translates quite literally to "you're fucking ants" and is my all time favorite in all languages I speak well enough to know lots of expressions in.
I've lived in a couple of European countries and speak 7 different European languages (though my German is kinda crap and my Italian not much better) and regularly take the piss by playing the "ignorant foreigner" with the expressions in other people's languages and acting as if, by translating them literally, I totally misunderstood them.
This works great because there are so many expressions in pretty much all languages which are have entirelly different meanings when interpreted literally but the natives don't really think about it like that because they just learned that stuff as a whole block of meaning rather than having reached it by climb the language-learning ladder from "understanding the words first" as foreigners do.
For example the English expression "I want to pick your brains" which has quite a different and more gruesome meaning if read literally or one the dutch expressions for "you're wasting time in small details" which translates quite literally to "you're fucking ants" and is my all time favorite in all languages I speak well enough to know lots of expressions in.