My friend was in Germany, and she thougth that "ausfart" was a city.

Tone

I used to believe that learning foreign languages was simply a case of swapping letters in the alphabet. So in french the letter 'a' would be the english letter 'c', and so on. It was going to be so easy.

Gareth

When I was a young chap I couldn't understand why we had to learn English in school. I supported this with my belief of that every country had their own twist of English. Norwegians spoke Norwegian-English, the swedes spoke Swedish-English and so forth.

Norwegian fella who now LOVES English

I`m from Norway and I thought that everyone spoke their own language,but inside they where thinking norvegian all the time.

Akasha

When I was young I used to believe that people who spoke English were the only people to speak properly.
I thought that speakers of other languages only spoke those because they didn't know how to speak English.

Fishy

I once asked a teacher why a song that rhymed in French and Spanish also rhymed in English. He said they all did that. I thought he meant that everything that rhymed in one language rhymed in every language...which seemed very weird.

Rick

I always thought "amscray" was a foreign word. My Dad would use that to tell us to get out of the car and I thought it was some kind of foreign word for "get out". I was in college before I figured out it was pig latin for "scram".

julie

When I was about 7 years old, my family and I were going to take a trip to Finland and Sweden. I knew they didn't speak English there, but, for some reason, I believed that their laughter would sound different than mine, as they would laugh in a foreign language!

Kristin G

I once tried to convince people I could speak Chinese by talking random giberish and telling them it was Chinese

Anon

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

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 foreign languages consisted of swapping each letter of the English alphabet with another - so A in English would be F in French, etc then later I became a language teacher

yeah really

Katie