foreign languages

I'm Chinese American and when I was a kid, I lived in the USA, in a small town with no other Chinese people except an elderly lady and her son who spoke a different Chinese dialect we didn't understand so we just spoke to them in English. No one else knew a word of Chinese. I used to believe that 1. Chinese is a rare language. 2. Each Chinese family spoke a different dialect of Chinese.

Anon

I used to believe that people had a special in-ear translator that converted the language they were hearing into English, so they could understand it.

Sibyana

I'm bilingual, and i can speak english and spanish because my mum always spoke to me in spanish. i couldn't actually speak english for the first few years of my life, and my mum always had to translate what i was saying to my dad. i was quite frustrated that i couldn't speak to my dad so i spoke to him in what i thought was english, but it was just spanish in an english accent!! (my godmother loves telling anyone who'd listen about this story!!)

spanish speaker from London

i used to ask my mom how people laughed in diferent languages!

Anon

I used to think that one letter in English ment one letter in another language. So I thought that "A" would be "h" in French or something like that. I was so stupid!

Bradley

I used to believe that Spanish and Italian were the same language;Spanish was for boys and Italian for girls

Anon

I used to believe that if you spoke to someone in their language they would actually hear it in English.. for instance If you said to a French person "Bonjour, Comment allez vous" They would actually hear you say "hello, how are you".

Jiggly x

My grandmother's native tongue was Japanese and she pronounced English words very poorly. Up through college, my mom would say and even write in papers "asuna" as a word, not realizing that that's how her mother pronounced "as soon as."

nihonjin

I grew up in Denmark, where the 2nd language we learn is English, and the 3rd is German. I thought that Denmark was an island in the sea, then England was another neighbouring island, and then Germany was beyond England, etc. And such, all the countries are therefore lined up, with the easiest language (Danish) first, and the hardest last.

Christian

As a child I used to think that everybody speaks the same language, mine.

Eva

Since Germans speak German, I thought Jewish people spoke Jewish.

Lori

I used to think that to speak any other language besides English you had to be some kind of genius. I used to be so amazed when six year olds spoke French.

Eleanor S

I used to believe that you can only speak one language and didn't allow to speak another one.My language is Turkish and i worried i wouldn't have a chance to speak a foreign language.

Arwen Undomiel

i used to believe that you could communicate with anyone in the world by simply spelling out the English sentence one letter at a time using the pronunciation of their alphabet.

Anon

When I was just learning to read, one of my favorite books was Babar. Because I couldn't read it (my mom had to read it out loud to me), and because Babar is French, I thought that the book was written in French and that my mom was really smart to be able to translate it into English for me. It was actually written in cursive.

So, for the longest time, I thought that anything written in cursive was French!

Molly

The Chinese language just had three words: ching, chang, and chong.

MD Caruso

when i was 13 i believed for a year that Australian was a language after seeing the commercials and being convinced by my brother

Anon

When I was little, we moved a lot. The first move I remember, I was scared. You see, I was sure that Indiana spoke a different language (all the states had thier own as far as I was concerned), and I was terrified that I wouldn't be able to learn Indianain, and I'd forget the language I already knew.

Anon

I used to think that people that spoke different languages just made up jibberish as they went along in a converstion.

None

I used to believe that kids in France were really smart. They already had learned French! It didn't occur to me that they had been taught French from the beginning and had to learn English in school like I learned French. Unfortunately, I was in Jr. High School when I came up with that - before then, I never thought about any other language. I thought everyone spoke English.

Anon