foreign languages

I used to believe when I was 5 or 6 that if you kept talking with a stronger and stronger accent that eventually your words would come out in a different language.

sadly disappointed

I used to believe that words that rhymed in English would rhyme in every other language as well. How else could a song be translated and still sound like a song, right?

Anon

When I first got elected to student government in my first year of university (so, I wasn't a kid then, I was NINETEEN years old, lol), whenever we talked about moving "in and out of camera," I kept looking around to see if I could find an actual camera hidden in the ceiling or something. One day, I asked this one really nice older guy where the camera was, and, fighting back the urge to laugh at me, he explained to me that it was just a Latin term to distinguish private, closed-door discussions from matters where we didn't have to worry about confidentiality so much.

Emily (still looking for that camera!!! ;) )

English is not my native language, I started learning it when I was 10. Until high school, I used to believe that there was an English word "ough", which meant insufficient, and "enough" was its negated version.

memo

i used to think that to speak spanish all you had to do was say the word with an 'm' in front of it. so to say "pizza" you would just say "mizza". if the word started with an 'm', you said it with a 'b'. where i came up with this i have no idea...

not a spanish speaker

when I was little I thought that to speak a foreign language all you had to do was say an english word backwards. (i.e. soft was tfos)I thought there was only one foreign language and that was how they were doing it. It sounded weird enough when I tried it so it made sense to me!

Mona Lisa

I used to think that Russian was just English backwards

Millie

I used to believe that the words Angliphile and Francophile were related to the word paedophiles.

Anon

In Belgium, when a public holiday falls on a Thursday or Tuesday, some companies try to allocate an extra day off on Friday or Monday, thus bridging the public holiday and the weekend making an extra long weekend.
Literally translated you would hear people ask and tell each other :
"We build a bridge on Friday, do you?"
Imagine my excitement when I thought my parents were building bridges all over the country! My friends were all in awe as well!

Dominik

I used to believe that to speak Spanish all you had to do was a an "o" to the end of each word.

!!.-ariel-.!!

I used to think, that children in different countries laugh in different way, just because they spoke different languages.

Joanna

When I was about 8 I had never heard a foriegn language before so I thought that when it finally did happen the sounds of their language just wouldn't register so all I would hear is buzzing.

Anon

When I was little I used to think that people who spoke a different language, were actually talking in our language, but since they were from a different country that it came out in a code.

Anon

I used to think that people speaking another language were really just speaking English with a really strong accent. I was convinced that I could speak those languages too by mimicking their "accent."

Anon

When I was 5 years old, a new girl joined my class from Germany, I had no idea she was from another country until later on when I was riding in the car with her and her mother and they began speaking to one another in German. I thought all foreign people must look different to me, and because they looked the same as me, it never crossed my mind that they might be from another place, actually I don't think I'd heard of foreign languages existing at all. I spent the entire car journey listening really hard and panicking because I couldn't understand why their words made no sense to me. I really thought I was going mad. You can imagine my relief when I discovered my brain was working again when I met up with my mother at the end of the journey.

Layla

I'm from Finland, so my mother language isn't English. In Finnish we pronounce actually the same way we write (for example we pronounce Finland's capital Helsinki like Hell-sin-key and kiikari (binocular) little bit like key-car-e). I only knew that in English you write differently than you pronounce, but i thought that it works like A is E, T is V, B is D and so on. so i thought that people who speak english just change letters in their head and then pronounce it like people in finland. I'm not sure when I figured out how it really works but at least at school when I started to study English. I hope you understand my explanation :)

Heya

When I was young, my mom would make "au gratin" potatoes. I always thought she was saying "og rotten" potatoes. I always wondered why something rotten tasted so good.

Jo

When I was little, I watched a lot of "Pepe Le Peu" cartoons. I was convinced that French cats meowed in French, for example: "Le meow".

ChristiCo

When i was a little kid i found a video on youtube of someone playing a guitar and singing in German. I thought he was speaking gibberish until i showed my mom the video and she told me he was speaking German. For a long time, i thought that german was the language of germs and that he was singing a song about germs(since i didn't understand the song)

Anon

When I was young I used to believe that people who spoke English were the only people to speak properly.
I thought that speakers of other languages only spoke those because they didn't know how to speak English.

Fishy