Translations

As the weeks go by and we speak with more and more people, it becomes obvious that the meaning of some words varies greatly depending on where you learned English.  Some of them are obvious, or the ones that you know about from tv shows like lift (elevator) or telly (television).  Here's a couple other examples:

Crisps = Potato Chips

Chips = French Fries

Post = Mail

Bin Liner = Garbage Bag (and the bags come in a convenient roll, which is neat)

Pants = Underwear

Trousers = Pants (although my neighbour told me that pants is catching on, in large part due to american tv shows like Scrubs and Friends that are on every day).

And I haven't gotten used to the 24 hour clock, either.  

Pronunciation can also cause trouble, but this is difficult to express through text.  It's most noticeable on tv commercials e.g. Pantene is pronounced Pantin.  And we do get a kick out of the pronunciation of zebra (rather than sounding like zee, the first syllable sounds like zed).  And pita bread is pitta bread in both spelling and pronunciation.  The first time I saw that I honestly thought it was a typo.  

I'm sure there's many more examples that I'm forgetting, but hopefully this gives you a quick taste of British English.  And a quick thanks goes out to Aunt Donna and family who first made us aware of the many differences in language by giving us a British Language guide before we moved -- it has been useful.