Was sollst du einen Deutscher nicht fragen? (What shouldn't you ask a German)

Every cultural linguistic body has distinctive idioms with a whole range of meanings from the concrete to the abstract. This is a big part of what makes learning a new language so interesting and potentially frustrating and embarrassing all at the same time.

I am just entering my second term of German, which is by far the most study intensive of all the courses I have this semester, but at the same time it offers great dividends. Up to this point our "Deutschlernen" has focused primarily upon how things should be phrased, but today we learned a few examples of how the sense of a word can have a vastly different meaning not only within the German language, but also when you are trying to communicate between German and English.

For example:

"Mir ist heiß" and "Ich bin heiß" have identical literal translations in English (I am hot), however their meanings are vastly different. The first means "I am hot" in the sense of temperature and the second "I am hot" as in sexy. This is not difficult for those of us native to English to understand because these idioms are cognate with our own, but this is not always so.

Example #2:

Again, "Mir ist warm" and "Ich bin warm" have the same literal translation into English. As I'm sure you guessed both these phrases literally mean "I am warm". As before, the first phrase is a reference to temperature and the second also refers to a state of being. However in this second example the German idiom has a far different meaning that it does in English. Let's just say to be "warm" in German is to be "gay" in English. (When phrased in the second way of course).

So, if you ever find yourself on a balmy summer afternoon hanging out at a BBQ (or something of the like) and you have the urge to try out some German on an unsuspecting and shy exchange student just be sure not to say, "Bist du warm?" (Are you warm?) because you might not get the response you are expecting!