foreign languages

My full name is Ericka Minerva but before I came to the U.S. I was known as Minerva. Nobody had ever called me Ericka before so I wasn't even aware of this being my name. Well, when I started kindergarted, the teacher noticed that I had 2 names and wanted to know which I preferred, so she asked me, "Do you want me to call you Ericka?" I responded with "Ericka?" meaning I didn't understand what she was trying to say so she took it to mean that I wanted to be called Ericka.
So for the first few weeks I would not respond when she would call me because I wasn't aware of this being my name. She finally got frustrated and called my parents(who also didn't know that they were calling me Ericka at school) and asked them why I didn't respond to "Ericka". They finally told me that "Ericka" was also my name and to start paying attention when I heard it. Well ever since then, I have never been called Minerva anymore. Everybody knows me as Ericka and it even sounds funny when somebody calls me by my "old" name!

Ericka "Minerva"

I ws born here in the United States but my parents are from Mexico so because of this I was taught both languages. When I was little I knew both languages fluently and being a small child, I didn't know that noth everybody spoke Spanish as well. I remember saying half
a sentence in spanish and finishing it off in english. My teachers would always get on to me because they couldn't fully understand me which was a mystery to me because I thought I was speaking only one language! I still occasionally go off in Spanish without knowing it because to me speaking English and Spanish at the same time is normal.

Ericka

My father is Haitian and my mother is not. All the black people I knew when I was little were Haitian. So I used to think that all black people spoke French, and people would assume that I did because I was black.

a little mixed race gurl

I used to believe that people who were speaking foreighn languages were just speaking gibberish.

Zoe

I was so awed at meeting a real live French person who was on an exchange visit to our school that I asked him for his autograph...ouch...

Anon

I used to sing English songs in Gibberish believing that I was singing them in English...

Chaotic

Until the age of 7, I was convinced that everyone, despite speaking different languages, actually thought and wrote in English. When I saw a Latin inscription on one of the old Roman movies I was horrified to see that people wrote in other tongues as well. Nevermind, that must be because that was in the old days. I thus got a shock when I started French class...

Sam

I used to think that people speaking foreign languages must all be thinking in English at the same time - it never occurred to me that people could think and speak other languages without knowing a single word of English!

Anon

As a child I could never understand how kids in other countries could manage to learn their languages. I figured it must be much more difficult than Norwegian (my own language) since it sounded like gibberish.
I also wondered why not everyone could speak Norwegian, since it was clearly much easier than other languages, in addition to it being so practical since we could understand each other that way.

Later in life I attempted to study Latin. Even though I was an adult by then, I almost caught myself wondering how the hell the Romans managed to make sense of anything. I was so frustrated by the cases and lack of sentence structure, that I made up a joke theory of how the Roman empire collapsed because of confused communication.

Christer

When I was child, I used to believe that at the begining of the world, many people of each nationalitys talk together to choose a language for each one and that's because each nationalitys had their proper language.

Anon