As an Italian-American who rarely gets to speak Italian, my visits to my family in Italy are full of these kinds of things, but in the other direction, naturally.

I end up using less common, typically larger words mostly because they have direct equivalents in English, including a whole bunch that end in -ation, which in Italian typically end in -azione.

My relatives joke with me that I'm a weird, overeducated dummy who "knows" these big words but doesn't know basic idioms.

As an Italian in the US, I initially had trouble in stores asking for "sodium bicarbonate" (baking soda) or "talc" (baby powder). I would have never thought of those names since I didn't need them for either baking or babies.

But maybe it was just my accent.

In Spanish we call them "antenas parábolicas".

I knew what a parabólica was as a child, but learnt the root of the word until high school math class.

I had a moment in math class when I thought... "So that's why it's called parabolica".

Other Latins might not have been so impressed. This is exactly what we call it in Portuguese: a parabolic antenna (antena parabólica).

I find that particularly amusing because Parabola is exactly how we call satellite dishes here in Italy. It’s technically called Antenna Parabolica but plenty of people simply call it Parabola (at least here up north)