Last word you learned in a foreign language

[ThatAnalysisGuy]

I learned two new words in Esperanto: "sekvinbero," meaning raisin, and "flosglacio," meaning sea ice. I also learned a new noun in German, "Angriff," meaning attack.

[Arayaz]

Portuguese esquecer (v.) to forget

[Arayaz]

Portuguese bacalhão lit. "cod," but also an insult meaning "clumsy, lazy, of little intelligence / who doesn't know what to say."
Irish iontach "wonderful"
Indonesian kecap "soy sauce" (very confusing, as it looks and sounds like "ketchup"

[Fluffy8x]

Welsh defaid sheep (plural). Just learned this after knowing the singular form (dafad) for a long time.

[Acipencer]

hagyma, onion

[zyma]

columpio (n.) "swing"

If I understand correctly, it means "swing" as in the type of hanging seat one might find at a playground, for instance.

[Salmoneus]

Indonesian kecap "soy sauce" (very confusing, as it looks and sounds like "ketchup"

Looks, sounds, and is of course ultimately the same word - as is even clearer when you consider obsolete spellings like 'ketjap' and 'catsup'.

Ironically, both America and Indonesia have distorted the original meaning, which was garum (fish sauce). In Europe, this was supplemented with mushrooms. Later, people experimented adding tomatoes, took out the mushrooms, and eventually even took out the fish.

(many people partcularly associate 'ketchup' with tomato ketchup, but you can still buy other forms, and tomato ketchup usually still has 'tomato ketchup' written on it to disambiguate as a result).

[Arayaz]

Indonesian kecap "soy sauce" (very confusing, as it looks and sounds like "ketchup"

Looks, sounds, and is of course ultimately the same word - as is even clearer when you consider obsolete spellings like 'ketjap' and 'catsup'.

Ironically, both America and Indonesia have distorted the original meaning, which was garum (fish sauce). In Europe, this was supplemented with mushrooms. Later, people experimented adding tomatoes, took out the mushrooms, and eventually even took out the fish.

(many people partcularly associate 'ketchup' with tomato ketchup, but you can still buy other forms, and tomato ketchup usually still has 'tomato ketchup' written on it to disambiguate as a result).

Thank you! This makes more sense than it just being a coincidence, too :)

[Kovora]

Finnish: maitoo - milk

[Arayaz]

Portuguese frear "to brake"
Indonesian bisa "to be able to"
Irish lón "lunch"

[eldin raigmore]

Piphilology.
I learned it from Sandi Toksvig’s QI. So, maybe it’s English?
It refers to the habit or custom or hobby of making up word-strings as mnemonics for the decimal expansion of the dimensionless constant pi, which is the ratio of a Euclidean circle’s circumference to its diameter.
(Such a mnemonic is called a piem. Piphilology is the philology of piems.)
Each word has as many letters as the corresponding digit of pi.
This would work in any language written with an alphabet and using a decimal system of numerals;
though it might vary if spelling were inconsistent!
Example:
“How I wish I could calculate pi” decodes to 3(.)141592

[Arayaz]

“How I wish I could calculate pi” decodes to 3(.)141592

Brilliant.

Also: Portuguese estação = "season" and "station"

[ThatAnalysisGuy]

Icelandic ör "arrow"

I learned that word by searching the etymology of English word arrow. I also learned the Gothic word arhwazna from this.

[lsd]

unfortunately, mamad, an acronym for merhav mugan dirati,
an obligatory strong room in new housing in Israel...

[Visions1]

/tɬʼp/ to cut with scissors - Nuxalk

[LinguistCat]

( パンの )耳 - heel (of bread) lit: bread ears

[Glenn]

(I wrote a post for this thread earlier, then deleted it accidentally; I am hoping for better luck this time…)

One word I recently encountered for the first time was Russian перипетия peripetiya, “a sudden twist or reversal.” The example given in Wiktionary is перипети́и жи́зни perepetii zhizni “the twists and turns of life”; the usage in the original text I read was not exactly the same, but something similar. (I subsequently learned that the same term exists in English as well, as “peripeteia,” ultimately from Greek περιπέτεια.)

Another Russian term that temporarily threw me for a loop is ври́о vrio, which turned out to be short for вре́менно исполня́ющий/исполня́ющая обя́занности vremenno ispolnyayushchii (m.)/ispolnyayushchaya (f.) obyazannosti “temporarily fulfilling the responsibilities (of)”, a phrase I had already encountered before. The English equivalent would be “acting,” as in “the acting director”; whereas in English, the word cannot be used without including the position (* “the acting said…”), I’m pretty sure that I saw ври́о used on its own.

I work for an American facility of a French company, and quite a few of our E-mails and online resources are bilingual in French and English or translated from French into English. At the bottom of some of these E-mail was a line beginning with Réunion, which my brain automatically connected with the island of Réunion, especially since it was capitalized; I finally realized that it was in fact réunion “meeting” (e.g., “Réunion Microsoft Teams” = “Microsoft Teams meeting). Along similar lines, there is a particular technical abbreviation frequently used at my workplace, and I could not figure out what it stood for, until I discovered that it was an abbreviation of a French phrase, not an English one. (Most of the staff just use the abbreviation, without worrying about what it stands for.)

On a final note, my wife and I recently tried switching the voice on our GPS driving app from English to Russian, since our Russian is rusty. We both spent time living in Russia (and in my case, Kazakhstan as well) many years ago; however, since neither of us owned a car there, we never had much cause to learn terms specific to driving. We’ve already picked up a few (e.g., the GPS used the phrase две полосы справа dve polosy cprava for “the two right lanes.”)

(My apologies for the length of this post, and the perhaps-idiosyncratic transcription of the Russian above.)