foreign languages

I used to believe that people who spoke foreign languages had to translate it into English before they understood what it meant

Anon

When I was young, I though the actors and actresses should be able to speak in all languages, because I had seen the Dallas in Turkish, English, German and Arabic TV...

sel

I used to think that the British were very snobbich, because they thought they were too good to make the "long e" sound.

I had yet to discover what accents were.

Scix

When me and my brother were little we sometimes used to pretend we were foreign and speak random gobbledegook to each other - usually in the middle of a shopping centre or other public place. Our mum must have been so embarrassed!

Clare

Growing up, I thought that my family that spoke Yiddish were speaking in cursive.

Anon

I used to believe that a person who blows on the french horn would suddenly say words in French out of the horn.

Anon

my parents use to talk in chinese (my 2nd language) and subsequently hakka and teochew (their dilects) when they didnt want me or my sister to know what they were talking about. i use to think that i was a code they made up in the middle of the night and that it wasnt a real language at all.

caris

When I was baout 4 I didn't know the English word for "grass". I used to call all ordinary grass "hashish". I had no idea what that really referred to...lol

Soo

When I was a kid, a newspaper published the Russian Alphabet. I thought I was very clever in substituting the letters of English words with the Russian equivalent.... to this day, I blush when I am reminded of it, as I told everyone I could now speak/write Russian!

Donny

I am from Scotland and I was told that my country was Scotland so when I was reading about the English and that the English speak English I though English was a foreign lanuage I couldn't understand and I even imagined it sounding wierd! I wouldn't accept that I actually spoke English, how could I; I'm Scottish am I not?

opinionata

I grew up speaking French and English equally. At first, I didn't even realize they were different languages! But when I figured it out, I decided everybody must know one or the other.

At a restaurant one night, I decided to tell the people at the next table about my stuffed bunny rabbit, who was very smart, and had figured out how the desserts were made. (I think it involved bicycle pumps for the meringues.) But they didn't understand me, so I tried it all again in the other language, which only confused them even more! My mom came to get me, rescuing the poor Germans from the weird kid babbling at them in English and French.

fey

A variation on the substitution theme: my family moved to Japan from California when I was seven. In Japanese class, they handed out a pronunciation chart for Hiragana, so I thought if I wanted to write in Japanese I just had to use these new characters instead of the latin alphabet.

Anon

I don't know how I managed this one, but I'm currently a French 3 honors student and, until someone corrected me this year, I believed the word 'Oui' (it means yes) was spelt 'Qui'. I guess I thought this because the u after q rule. I have no idea how I came this far without a teacher correcting me.

Anon

When I was young, I thought all fathers spoke german, and all mothers spoke english, but I thought they were the same language, because I understood both... one just sounded meaner! :)

Andreas Harris

When I was little, I thought that all translations had to go through English- for example, if you wanted to translate something from Spanish to French, you had to translate it into English first.

I think this is because I only ever saw Spanish-English and French-English dictionaries.

Anon

I used to think that Americans spoke American and Australians spoke Australian
I thought It would be weird for them to say they speak English when they weren't in England

I'm from England

Millie

My friend was in Germany, and she thougth that "ausfart" was a city.

Tone

When I was little, I moved from England to Canada. Before I left, once of my aunts told me that in Canada, everyone spoke a different language, and I'd have to say things like "Keller-eh-teel" (Quelle heur est'il?) and "Bomb sure" (Bonjour)
I was kinda nervous, because I wanted to keep speaking English.

However, years later in French class, I finally figured out what she had been trying to tell me, and it took most of my self-control to keep from laughing. (and showing off my knowledge of a few phrases she'd told me!)

Walks-the-Umbra

Brazilian Portuguese is my native language. When I was about 8, I had my first lessons of a foreign language (English). I thought it was difficult to translate a text from Portuguese into English. Then, it would get more and more complicated as you continued converting that text into French and then into German... up to a point when no one would be able to understand it.

Nino / Brazil

I remember thinking that non-English speakers were much smarter because they could speak "so much faster."

Anon