foreign languages

When I was young I thought that people from foreign countries that spoke a different language still thought in English.

Rachel

i used to think that if i just said random sounds of letters to make jubberish words that i was speaking spanish. i went up to a spanish lady one time and started talking like that, thinking she would understand me, and she gave me a strange look and walked away. i thought she didnt like what i said!

Hehehe.

My aunts and uncles used to find it hilarious that I assumed because I had grew up in Ireland that I spoke Irish. So at family parties or just in front of their mates they would ask me to "speak English" at which point I would launch into gibberish, their laughter only convinced me that I was gettting better at it!

Steve

I used to believe that if I spoke with whatever accent a language was in, I was speaking that language...

Renae

I use to think that there was some secret code to translate english into a different language so for the first semester of my spanish class i sat there wondereing when the teacher would teach us the code

Lilly

i used to think everyone in the world spoke english

Me

whn i was about 5 i used to believe english was the easiest language to learn and couldnt understand y everyone did nt just speak english it would make life so much easier i contiued to believe this for another 6 years!!

turty

I thought people who didn't speak English were just being difficult. I thought since words in other languages could be translated to english that people who spoke other languages could speak and understand english but just chose not to.

Kay

We had a dairy queen right next to a SunCoast (I think that's right, yellow jagged sign) Gas Station, so the signs were together on the same pole. I use to think that they meant the same thing since they were on the same pole (like SunCoast meant Dairy Queen in Spanish).. so whenever I saw a SunCoast gas station I would scream for my mom to stop and get ice cream.. I didn't figure out the different until I was 11 and we took a trip to Mexico and saw a dairy queen..

Kay

when I was just a little girl, we had the classic video of "the Wizard of Oz", but it had no suntitles (and english is not my first language). So I saw the video with my dad to explain to me, and at the end, when when the lion sings his kings' song, I asked him what the song is about. He told me he don't know, 'coz the song is in lions' language (and I stopped asking).

Dar-U-la

I used to think that every language used a different alphabet. Once I was in Frankfurt on stopover. All the airport signs had the german on the top and the english on the bottom. So i thought the german words were just english adjectives, despite the fact that the two languages were distinguisehed by different colors. Plus it did not help much that i did not see any signs that read a german word with umlauts over certain vowels or that letter which looks like a beta. Anyway I came across a sign for baths, and the german for bath is "Bad" (also in plural form). And since the german was over the english, I thought it was a place where you take not-so-good baths. Soon I joked, "you take bad baths in germany and good baths in america." I ended up taking german in college to fulfill the language distrbution requirement. I shared that story with my classmates and my instructors.

ich bin ein dumkopf

I used to think that every language used a different alphabet. My family is indian,and the languages spoken in india for the most part did not use the same alphabet. When I was around 8 or 9, i found out that French, german, spanish, italian, swedish, polish, etc also use the roman alphabet.

Anon

since I live in CANADA i used to think that every country had two offical languages and that every primary school student had to lear both of them like I had to learn french and english.

Y2K

I used to believe that no matter what language any other person spoke i thought they would understand me if I spoke my english slower! Of course i have now found out that that isnt the case.

Polly Dolly

Well, my grandmother on my mother's side sometimes used Japanese words, since she knew Japanese before any other language. She used to talk to my mom and she'd say something along the lines of "That (thing here) is so kawaii" Kawaii in Japanese is "cute". I didn't understand that until later, but I did understand that "Kawai" was the brand name of the same grandmother's piano. I started crying when she said that I was kawaii, because I thought she would make me into a piano. I was about five.

Shizuka