foreign languages

I once thought english was the only real language and the others were just made up

Anon

My cousin & I were the 2 oldest, we began speaking our own language he was 11 and i was 7. We really thought we understood eachother, and we really thought we were speaking spanish. To this day we don't know what the heck it was! Our family loves to tell that story.

sl

When i was about 4 i was on a boat in a childrens play room and there was a a girl there talking french. I tryed copying what i thought she was doing, talking giberish once i was done she slaped me. I have a feeling i actualy said something, but it wasnt very nice though.

bob

In a history class, actually we were fairly old, a girl in the back perks up in the middle of a discussion about one of the worl wars, and contribute to the conversation with this "Oh, do they speak english in Great Britain?"

Anon

I used to beleive that Spanish was just English spelled backwords.

srj

Growing up in Southern California, my brother and I used to believe that every foreign language was Spanish and thus anyone not speaking English was speaking Spanish.

Tanda

English is not my primary language, but I used to believe that people on T.V. uses our country's language, Tagalog.

Herbert R. L.

My maternal grandparents are Russian immigrants, but we all live in an English-speaking country. They would babysit me when I was little, and they would speak Russian to me all the time. As a result, I understood both English and Russian, as does my mother. But for the first few years of my life, I didn't understand that they are different languages, and sometimes I'd talk to my father in Russian and think he was stupid for not understanding

Anon

When I was really young, I thought pop stars sang only in English, or else Spanish. (I'm from Texas.) I was in junior high when I started finding out about rock in other languages. Now I'm 26 and think that foreign-language pop is the greatest thing.

Hilary the Baker

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

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

Rachel

Whenever I heard someone speaking Spanish, it sounded like giberish to me, so I'd speak random giberish and say it was "Spanish"

Amanda

I used to belive that everyone spoke the same language. i thought the people talking in different languages were just talkng jibberish.

Andrew

i used to think that people who spoke foreign languages or had different accents had something mentally wrong with them.

Anon

As a French, when I was young, I thought every body spoke French at birth, and that people in other countries had to learn another language very early. I felt pity for them, and I was so proud for myself! This belief was supported by the fact that the first language the speakers use in the Olympic Games (on tv) is French : it's why I thought it was the first language at all.

Aude

I believed until about age six that all Black people could speak Spanish.

Alan

Not that I was racist when I was young, but I used to think that Spanish and Chinese were the exact same thing.

JRE1

Both my parents were born and raised in Cuba, so as a little girl in the U.S. my first language was Spanish and I learned English while learning to read and write (required for my preschool) and at first I only wrote LIKE THIS IN ALL CAPS. I thought THIS was "Spanish letters" and this was "English letters" Later, I thought the same about cursive and print. Print was "Spanish" and cursive "English" In my defense, my parents did not try to set me straight which led to embarassing moments.

Se.eS

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

Chaotic

One day, a teacher of mine told the class that she overheard a couple with a newborn talking about the baby.
She told us the mother said, "I'm glad we're not Chinese."
The father goes "Why?"
The mother says, "Because if we were, we would have to teach the baby Chinese."
The father believed the mother.

Wow. That. Is. Sad.

Lara T.