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When I was around 5 years old I went to Mexico on a vacation. I was in the pool at our hotel and this little Mexican girl came up to me because she wanted to play. I was trying to talk to her but she kept speaking in Spanish and I couldn't understand her. I thought that she could understand english and that's what it would be in her head, but since she was born in Mexico she HAD to speak Spanish.
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
Up until I took a 3rd year of spanish i thought everyone thought in english. I figured out it was wrong when i started thinking in spanish
When i was a child I used to believe that English was Spanish, but written backwards. So I thought that blue was said "luza" (azul). I used to speak like that all the time.
Natalia-Colombia
When I was a kid I used to believe that when people spoke in languages other than english, their brains somehow converted the sounds INTO english, so that they would hear it in english and could therefore understand it.
drfish
I used to think Braille was the language they used in Brazil. I don't think I knew that Braille was the raised dots on everything.
When I was little I used to think that everyone in the whole world spoke English. No matter what. So whenever I heard someone speak another language I would always wonder why they would go through the trouble of thinking in English and then speaking a whole different language.
I used to believe that foreign languages just had different letters, and if you knew what the letters sounded like it would make sense in English.
Ima Hogg
When I was small I believed that there was a secret trick to turn English into any new language, as with Pig Latin. Perhaps a more complex trick with a few new sounds, but a pattern that could be easily learned. Then I began French lessons. The first week we were told about an important "irregular" verb (etre - to be), but that most were regular. So I still expected to learn the secret trick the next week. When I discovered I would have to learn every single french word, I was surprised and immensely disappointed.
Jennifer
Used to believe that Spanish was just English with random o's and a's tagged to the end of the words (probably because there are many cognates that are formed in just that way).
Also believed that the written forms of languages were merely coded English, and if I could just figure out which letters/symbols stood for which English letters, I could read them.
Steven
As a child i grew up in england but spoke portguese at home. I didn't know anyone outside of my family who could speak it, therefore i believed that portuguese was a language invented by my family and used only by my family
I don't totally recall how this worked, but I was convinced that there were various languages in the world: French, Chinese, etc. but English was "the REAL language" and referred to it as such.
Darren
I am from Scotland, and I used to believe that Gaelic was the language they spoke on an island called Garlic, situated off the north coast of Scotland.
Mairi
As a child, I believed that anyone who spoke a foreign language had to translate it into English in their heads in order to understand it.
Nicole
I used to believe that even though people may have spoken different languages, we all thought to ourselves in english in our heads.
Liz
When i was a little girl i had a tea set that i always kept in it's box on my bookshelves. The box was all written in another language but i didn't understand this and so i always got incredibly frustrated when i couldn't read it. It got to the point that my dad had to put the box at the top of my wardrobe because i couldn't sleep.
when I was little I thought that to speak a foreign language all you had to do was say an english word backwards. (i.e. soft was tfos)I thought there was only one foreign language and that was how they were doing it. It sounded weird enough when I tried it so it made sense to me!
Mona Lisa
We once had an Austrian exchange student, Maria, stay with us. We were driving around her showing her the Aussie countryside and we passed some emus in a paddock. 'Look!' Maria exclaimed, 'Emos!'
This was met with much laughter. She didn't have any idea what we were laughing at.
AllyKat
When I was in college, I took Swahili. When we came in the door of class the first day, the instructor started pointing to stuff and saying "Nini hii?" (Nina hee) Which later we found out meant "What is this?". For a few seconds I was convinced that if "Nini hii?" was the name for everything in the room, the class would be a cinch to pass. I still enjoyed the class when I discovered I was wrong, and went on to study it for 2 more years.
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.
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