foreign languages

My dad can be very silly and is always making up words and saying them over and over again. When I was little, he also used to occasionally say random words in French. Since I had never heard anyone but him say them, I assumed he made them up too.

Anon

When i was little i believed that all words were the same in all languages, just that they were pronounced differently.

Terracrafty

I used to think Russians had surnames ending with ski because of the skiing they do in Siberia.

Anon

I used to believe that everyone in the world understood english, but that people in foreign countries had to hear something in their own language first, then they translated it into english in their head... yes, I was a strange kid.

Emma B

I used to believe that, even though people from other countries spoke different laguages, everyone thought in English.

superjill

when one of my friends was little, she just could not understand why people spoke different languages. she thought everyone thought in english and translated in their heads! how crazy! hee hee

raquel

For a while I believed that French version of "Are you Sleeping" was a giant government conspiracy, and that they were trying to cover up secrets by singing a song in French that nobody would understand.

TK

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

I used to believe that people who spoke other languages thought in English, hence in Germany a guy would say to another guy "Guten tag" and the other guy would think "Okay, um, Guten Tag means Good day."

Currently bilingual

I thought that people that spoke different languages had psichic powers

Micah

I thought that Japanese and Chinese both had Kawaii....

BONUS: I thought that Japanese and Chinese languages were just symbols!

Shanghaijuku

Assuming that the word fraud has German origins, I used to get it confused with Freud, and wondered how it made a connection together. Maybe a scientific bank crime, to be imaginative?

Anon

I used to believe that translating from language into language was only a matter of changing letters ! :)

EwS

i used to belive that in everyones head they understood english, like if they heard a different launguage and inside their head they changed it to english to understand it, thusfor all other languages were just made to confuse people, and i thought that i was super lucky to understand and speak english. my mum never did get why i kept asking "why is it that people have to speak other languages when brains speak english??" to this day she doesn't understand it.

L

I used to think that if only you listened closely and intensely enough you would be able to understand any language automatically without learning it. I remember on holiday a German girl came up to me and started talking. She ran away after I had spent a few minutes leaning towards her , hands behind my back with an intense look of concentration on my face.

Anon

Oddly enough, a lot of people seemed to have this belief. I believed everyone in the world thought in english, but people who spoke other languages translated into their language before saying it out loud. I believed this up until 7th grade when my french teacher, who was fluent, told us she sometimes dreamed in french.

Anon

When I was young, I thought other people's languages sounded like english to them, and english would sound like their language sounds to me, like spanish speakers heard english when I heard spanish, and they heard spanish when I heard english.

Anon

I thought that people who spoke a different languages were aliens.

Phoebe

I grew up as a foreign national in the United States. At home we only spoke our language. Since my dad worked, I rarely went out in the neighbourhood with him, so at three years of age, I concluded that my dad couldn't speak English. I never heard him speak a word of it, so that meant he couldn't speak English!(My mom could - I had heard her talk to the neighbours, etc.) One rare time my dad was taking me to the park and we were approached by a neighbour, and I got all set to translate, so imagine my shock when my dad started speaking English!
Kids...if it is outside of our little view of reality, we simply conclude it can't exist!

green card

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