foreign languages

I used to believe that when someone was born, no matter what country they lived in, automatically spoke English, and that their parents would have to teach them their native language.

deborah

I used to belive that everyone spoke the same language. i thought the people talking in different languages were just talkng jibberish.

Andrew

I used to believe the first language you knew and learned is the only one you could learn. It was like it was against the law, or your brain couldn't handle it. LOL!!!

LOL child

wen i was a lickle baby girl i thought that everyone spoke in different languages but they thought in English.

Ally

I used to believe, when I was younger, that people who would speak in different languages were speaking English but only backwards...-__-

Blu

My friend, who's nearly 13, recently exclaimed in a Latin lesson that she thought the ancient people (who actually spoke Latin as well as writing it) only wrote Latin but they spoke in English.

Jesi

I thought people in other (non-Enligh speaking) countries were smarter than we English speakers, because they would think in English and then translate to say, Latvian, or whatever language they spoke, before saying it outloud.

Bethan

my brother thinks that every foreign language he hears is spanish

Ryan

When I lived in Brasil I thought that everyone in the world spoke Portuguese and that all the TV shows were Brasilian... When i moved to the U.S. at 5 y.o., little did i know that 'Pica Pau' was really 'Woody The WoodPecker'... I was devastated to find out that he was a fraud...

Flavia

When I was a child, my parents, who could not speek English very well, had a friend named "Anjelita" and being being in school only speaking Enlish, I thought that this friend of the family was actually my "Aunt Helita", Later in life I asked my mom " Have you heard from my Aunt Helita?" and I got a look from her that in my mind said "What the Hell are you taliking about?" then I told her and she set me straight, heheheh

The Boogieman

i thought foreign laguages where alien talk.

lizzy

When i was about 7, i went on holiday to France with my family. After an overnight stay in a hotel, we were saying goodbye to the receptionist. My parents had been teaching me bits of the language on the journey over (because i thought one holiday would result in fluency. heh) so as we left i said "au revoir", and the French lady laughed. I was so embarrassed, under the impression that i had done something terribly wrong, that i refused to speak French again until i had to at secondary school. It was only about 2 years ago that i realised she was laughing because i was a 7 year old English kid trying to speak a foreign language. bless.

c

In the third grade (age eight) I began French classes at my elementary school. Every season we got some vocabulary to study and some worksheets to do (example: Easter we learned 'lapin', 'eouf', and 'printemps') from our teacher Mme Luc. We also did oral exercises to help us with pronounciation.

By Hallowe'en (still near the beginning of the term), I was terrible at pronounciation. When we did the oral exercise, we were given simple Frech sentences to read ('the flower and the cat', 'In my house', etc.).

Mine was 'Mme Luc et le bougie' which means: Miss Luc and the candle. I said,

"Madame Luc eats bogeys"

Marshmello Da Strawberry Cow

When I was little (about 5) my parents were friends with a spanish speaking woman and a german speaking man (married couple) I only understood German and English so I use to think if I spoke in any gibberish sounding words (that didn't make sense to me) that the woman would understand because anything I made up just had to be spanish since it wasn't English or German.

Momtotwo

My Father used to call my mother "Viega"
pronounced "Vi-eh-ha", which means "Woman" in spanish, and I used to belive my moms name was "Vieja"

Domingo

Whenever I heard someone speaking Spanish, it sounded like giberish to me, so I'd speak random giberish and say it was "Spanish"

Amanda

When I was 6 yrs old my parents bought me "Muzzy in Gondoland", English-teaching book for children . There was a glossary at the end of book, one of terms was exactly "Gondoland", translated as "Gondolandia" and with explanation in brackets "(imagined realm)" Of course it meant Gondoland was only imagined and didn't exist in real, but I thought, since I already knew what does "land" mean, that in English "gond" means something like "to imagine" :)

Pierdole was