When Dad first learned Portuguese, he made some hilarious mistakes. One was when he wanted to buy a kilo of nails for a project. Not knowing the word for “nails,” he looked it up in the dictionary and chose the first word he came to.
Armed with this knowledge, he went to the store and asked, in very broken Portuguese, for a kilo of “unhas.” With a somewhat alarmed expression, the proprietor denied they had such an item. Figuring he had put the accent on the wrong syllable, Dad tried variations of that word to no avail.
Finally, in frustration, Dad pointed to what he wanted. “Ah!!!” Beamed the store owner. “Prego!”