"I'll say sorry, but I'm not taking off my glasses"

The difficulty of n'importe quoi comes not only from it's wildly different translations but also that it makes no sense. With a basic understanding of French, you know that n' vaguely translates as don't, importer means, der, to import, and quoi is what.
Forget all of that. Don't import what! No import what! It will only confuse you.

Soeur: Augustin, arrête de crier !

Frère: Mais les espagnols ! Ils arrivent !

Soeur: N'importe quoi !

=

Sister: Augustin, stop yelling!

Brother: But the Spanish! They're coming!

Sister: Yeah right!

If you want to take it textbook style, this would be translated as nonsense.
It also means whatever, in the "it doesn't matter which" sense.

"Tu veux du gâteau où des crêpes ?"

"Où n'importe quoi."

=

"Do you want cake or some crêpes?"

"Or whatever."

But n'importe can be taken much farther! Here are a few examples of what can be done:

le boucher: Vous voulez lequel ?

Jean Bonnot: N'importe quel !

=

the butcher: Which one do you want?

Jean Bonnot: Whichever!

"Je peux inviter qui ?"

"N'importe qui tu veux ! C'est ton anniversaire !"

=

"Who can I invite?"

"Whoever you want ! It's your birthday!"

"Je fais n'importe quoi je veux, n'importe quand je veux !" = "I do whatever I want, whenever I want!"

N'importe quoi !

When-same

It's hard to search for a word when you can't spell what you're looking for. In the case of quand-même (which I thought was "quoi-même," but also tried "con-même," "ka-même"...), it took five months before I remembered to ask the school's English assistant, Rebecca, the only other American I knew of in Burgundy, what the hell this word that I heard everywhere meant. Or was.

quand-même = all the same; anyway; even so; still

Everything came together.

• Mon beignet a tombé par terre, mais je l'ai mangé quand-même = my donut fell on the ground,  but I ate it anyway.
• Quand-même, Hitler a envahi en juin 1941 = All the same, Hitler invaded in June of 1941.

Should've abided by that nonaggression pact, Hitler.

He probably thought it meant when-same.

Entrez dans le truc

Welcome! I judged that a fitting theme for this week's posts would be the words that took me the longest to understand. To start it all off, here is the truc.
un truc = a thing; a trick; stuff
It took me a while to stop convincing myself that this actually meant "truck." I never thought to look it up (even after I managed to buy myself a dictionary), and it wasn't until nearly two months into my stay that I figured it out.
What do you say if you're served some green mush that may still be alive?
"C'est quoi ce truc ?" = What is this stuff? Good luck understanding the response.
The only cognate-like translation of truc is trick. Know what you're getting into when your new sketchy French friends invite you to faire un truc dangereux !