Solution to No, I Understand You Perfectly

When we look at the puzzle, we see what appears to be a conversation where two people constantly misunderstand each other. For instance, in the flavortext, the blue speaker complains about the government, which the black speaker appears to interpret as being a complaint about mold. Coupled with the question “Are we really friends?” at the end, it appears that we should be looking into these pairs of false friends. Now it is just a matter of figuring out which languages the false friends are between.

Looking at the flavortext again, we notice the definitely not English word “Mitä”. Plugging it into Google Translate tells us that it means “what” in Finnish. Therefore, the blue speaker is probably speaking in Finnish. However, we note that the second language is not English, since “government” in Finnish is “hallitus” which is not an English word. Therefore, we have to figure out what the other language is. If we happen to be familiar with the relations between different languages, we might guess Estonian as the closest major language to Finnish, which would explain why the speakers are otherwise able to communicate just fine. A clue which can either help confirm this hunch or identify the language in the first place is the reference to a certain TalTech referenced by the black speaker. Googling TalTech gives us references to Tal Technologies Inc in Philadelphia and The Tallinn University of Technology in Tallinn, Estonia. Since we’ve established that the black speaker can’t be actually using English, we can assume that the TalTech in question is the university in Estonia, which means that the second language should be Estonian. Or we could google around and discover that Estonian and Finnish are known for having false friends between each other, with “hallitus” being a commonly used one.

Now it is just a matter of finding the parts of the conversation where the speakers don’t quite understand each other and figuring out what the word is being misunderstood. Fortunately for us, the dialogue appears to follow a pattern of:

• Phrase containing the initial misunderstood word
• Confused reaction to misunderstood word
• Attempt at clarification
• Repeat

This pattern holds until the Finn gives the Estonian a radio tuned to a numbers station. To confirm the false friends, we usually just need to put the words we think are being misunderstood into Google Translate and see if switching around the languages gives us what the conversation appears to be implying. The words being misunderstood in the conversation are as follows:

Now we just need to figure out what the numbers mean. Noticing that there are ten numbers and ten false friends allows us to consider indexing into the false friends. Doing so gives us the result KEHTOLAULU which is Finnish for LULLABY, the answer to this puzzle.