I've been in US Spanish classrooms as a student, teacher, and professor for over 30 years now. In that time I've heard and read a lot of unintentionally funny student errors. One particularly memorable one from an intermediate student's short story about a man getting lost as he drove across the desert:
"Carlos bajó del coche y tomó un ganso."
This sentence stopped me dead - "What goose?!", I thought. "Where did a goose come from in the middle of the desert? Where did he take it from? The back seat? The trunk?"
I re-read the story from the beginning, but nope - not a single goose was mentioned before this sentence. I stared at the sentence some more, I asked some other professors, and no one had the slightest idea what the student was trying to say. Finally I went to the dictionary, thinking that "ganso" must have some obscure alternate meaning that the student had stumbled onto by accident. And then my mental light bulb finally switched on:
"Carlos got out of the car and took a gander."
