When my husband applied for his first job when he was around 15 or so...
The application asked if he spoke a foreign language he put Enlgish. He got the job, I'm assuming because he made the interviewer laugh so hard when he read over the app. I asked him why he would put that. He said well I of course speak Amerian because I live in America & I took English in high-school so at the time it made sense. He also trys to play it off that he was nervous as it was his first job interview. Now when he mumbles something & I can't understand him...I'll ask him to let me know if he's speaking American or English so I can translate it as I am not bilingual.LOL!

S.L.H.

my parents use to talk in chinese (my 2nd language) and subsequently hakka and teochew (their dilects) when they didnt want me or my sister to know what they were talking about. i use to think that i was a code they made up in the middle of the night and that it wasnt a real language at all.

caris

Filipino people here often mix English with their Tagalog. So I came to the conclusion that Filipino people only created half a language and got lazy, so they took English to fill the rest.

Taglish

I am from Scotland and I was told that my country was Scotland so when I was reading about the English and that the English speak English I though English was a foreign lanuage I couldn't understand and I even imagined it sounding wierd! I wouldn't accept that I actually spoke English, how could I; I'm Scottish am I not?

opinionata

English is not my native language, I started learning it when I was 10. Until high school, I used to believe that there was an English word "ough", which meant insufficient, and "enough" was its negated version.

memo

when i was little my dad taught me some german .. i learned the word for red which is [sorry if i don't spell them right] "rot" [roht] and the word for bread which is "brot" [broht] . since they rhyme in english and german i thought you just had to know the endings of words and you could add the same letter as in english to the front! like head would be ''hot'' or said would be "sot" etc!~

schnurr~ =^.^=

I used to believe that people from foreign country laugh in foreign language. As well as German dogs bark in German language.

just stupid

Brazilian Portuguese is my native language. When I was about 8, I had my first lessons of a foreign language (English). I thought it was difficult to translate a text from Portuguese into English. Then, it would get more and more complicated as you continued converting that text into French and then into German... up to a point when no one would be able to understand it.

Nino / Brazil

I used to believe, that I am able to speak every foreign language only by learning "their" alphabet.

matej

When I was about 7 or 8, I thought I could speak every language in the world...and I told my parents this and I thought that they believed that I could...I would pick up the phone and talk different languages to the dial tone, thinking people could here me and they would talk back...Now I was extremely shy at this age, so whevever we went to a foriegn resturant my dad would threaten to tell the waiter that I could speak his language...so after about 2 months of that, I stopped. Parents ruin everything...

Stupid girl

I speak French and my sweet little sister, always trying to impress me, announced proudly that she could also speak French and spoke for the rest of the day in English but with an outrageous French accent, insisting that this was proof she was fluent.

Christina

I used to think that English was the only spoken language.One day in preschool my teacher invited a mom who who whould teach us French, when my teacher told me that I said,"I already know how to make french fries!"

Emmathel

When I was 5 years old, a new girl joined my class from Germany, I had no idea she was from another country until later on when I was riding in the car with her and her mother and they began speaking to one another in German. I thought all foreign people must look different to me, and because they looked the same as me, it never crossed my mind that they might be from another place, actually I don't think I'd heard of foreign languages existing at all. I spent the entire car journey listening really hard and panicking because I couldn't understand why their words made no sense to me. I really thought I was going mad. You can imagine my relief when I discovered my brain was working again when I met up with my mother at the end of the journey.

Layla

I used to believe that, being American, all the people in the world who did not speak English actually understood the language, and just took the extra time to 'convert' it into their own language so that we could not understand what they were saying. I thought this up through first grade, while we occasionally learned Spanish during that time so that we could also disguise our conversations as well

Anon

I'm from Finland, so my mother language isn't English. In Finnish we pronounce actually the same way we write (for example we pronounce Finland's capital Helsinki like Hell-sin-key and kiikari (binocular) little bit like key-car-e). I only knew that in English you write differently than you pronounce, but i thought that it works like A is E, T is V, B is D and so on. so i thought that people who speak english just change letters in their head and then pronounce it like people in finland. I'm not sure when I figured out how it really works but at least at school when I started to study English. I hope you understand my explanation :)

Heya

i used to think that to speak spanish all you had to do was say the word with an 'm' in front of it. so to say "pizza" you would just say "mizza". if the word started with an 'm', you said it with a 'b'. where i came up with this i have no idea...

not a spanish speaker

I remember thinking that non-English speakers were much smarter because they could speak "so much faster."

Anon

i used to think that if i just said random sounds of letters to make jubberish words that i was speaking spanish. i went up to a spanish lady one time and started talking like that, thinking she would understand me, and she gave me a strange look and walked away. i thought she didnt like what i said!

Hehehe.

When I was about 5, My mom and dad took me to my grandmother's house (she only speaks spanish), So I asked my mom "How do you laugh in spanish?"

Jezibela

When I was little (about 5) my parents were friends with a spanish speaking woman and a german speaking man (married couple) I only understood German and English so I use to think if I spoke in any gibberish sounding words (that didn't make sense to me) that the woman would understand because anything I made up just had to be spanish since it wasn't English or German.

Momtotwo