foreign languages

When I was little, I remember asking my dad why people that spoke other languages didn't just "learn how to speak normal" like we did. I thought English was the regular way to speak and other languages were just made up nonsense.

Victoria

When I was young I used to believe that people who spoke different languages only understood each other because they had different brains which heard the words in English

Anon

When I was about 5, I thought that English was the reverse reading of Turkish.

sel

I grew up in the South of Germany, so we watched a lot of Austrian TV. Most of the time the reception was very bad, and I figured out that the different accent of the TV speakers was not due to their Austrian dialect but some result of the bad TV reception.

Stefan, Germany

In Spanish Class in kindergarten, the Spanish teacher taught us a song about "Up and Down". The lyrics were simply "ariba... abajo...", but when he said "abajo", I thought he was saying "a bottle". I raised my hand and told the teacher that my little brother drank from a bottle. He ignored my remark, clearly having no idea what I was talking about.

Megan

I used to believe opera singing was a language all its own.

Rachel

When i was little i thought that people could laugh in different languages

Lauren

I'm from south west wales, and here we learn and speak welsh on a par with english. Because of the interuse of both languages i would some times get confused.
For instance the word "moron" in Welsh just means a carot, so i could never understand how calling somebody a type of vegetable was insulting.

moron

For a while I thought Anon was a name of an ancient philosopher. Probably Greek.

zeforeigner

My mother once told me that Latin was just when someone in old times would stand up and blabber things that no one else understood.

Anon

I am from Norway, and when i was a kid I used to believe thet gay people talked swedish!

Norway-Girl

I used to believe that if an american wants to adopt a chinese baby, he got to know how to speak Chinese, in order to communicate with the baby when it grows up.

hee

I use to beleive that because oui (which sounds exactly like wee) mean yes in french, that poo meant no.

Toby

I used to believe that foreigners' ears translated English words to their own language

Anon

Our French teacher always reminded us that "poisson" (meaning fish) had 2 "s"s. If we only put one "s", it was "poison". I took her literally, in that I thought if I spelled the word with one "s", the word would somehow turn poisonous. I never worked out the logistics on that.

Poisson d'Avril

In the childrens show "Tots TV", i didnt know what language the girl spoke (it was french). So as i kid, i thought she was just really stupid and blurted out random nonsense.

Stuu

When I was younger, my parents somehow convinced me that when you felt like you had already done something before, you were having a ménage à trois, instead of experiencing déjà vu.

Haley

When I was young my uncle told me that "the Japanese read backwards" (Meaning actually that they read from right to left.) I took this to mean that to speak Japanese I just had to learn to speak backwards. Like, sdrawkcab is Japanese for backwards... I practiced for a while, then met a Japanese kid who said that's not how it works. I don't trust my uncle very much anymore. ;-)

T.J.

When I was young, my father convinced me that kids in France were smarter than American kids because they learned French.

Debi

I thought all poems in all languages were written so that they would rhyme when they were translated into English.

Anon