When I was six at school we had a girl from Australia join us. Being interested in animals, I wanted to know what they were called in Australian. I didn't believe her when she told me a Kangaroo was called a Kangaroo in Australian nor when she told me a Koala Bear was called a Koala Bear. I told her she was making it up and wasn't really from Australia. I am now 33.

Billy Rooks

My family speaks German, and as a child I didn't grasp the concept of foreign languages. So when I first heard my aunt's husband, who was from Hungary, say a German word (as opposed to some Gibberish I couldn't understand), I exclaimed: "Look! Uncle Georg can speak!"

I still hear this regularly from my relatives.

ase

my friend thought that French was pronounced like English backwards, because we live in Canada, and English is on one side of packaging, and French on the opposite side.

Anon

I was shocked when I found out that dogs in foreign countries didn't know English commands.

Anon

When I was a kid, I thought there was a country where they spoke Pig Latin.

keyboardplayer

I used to believe that, if you were up to learn a foreign language, you should look at a book and 'decode', like 's=y', 'u=a',"n=j", so the word 'sun' would be 'yaj' in other language for example.

G.Albo

I was about 6 or 7 and was given a book of simple French words. I spent ages trying to work out the code which governed the translation, e.g. if hello was merci, then h=m, e=e, l=r etc. depending on where the letters were in the word. I used to make up my own languages on this basis.

I still do have too much fascination with words - I study linguistics.

Anon

I used to think that language was invented by the prime minister and that every time there was a new prime minister there would be a new language. The language would be announced on TV where he would sit there and read out words explaining the language, like "the word toaster means toaster, the word bus means bus" etc etc etc

Lizzie

When I was young I thought that 100 years ago everybody spoke the same language, and the languages we speak now were invented for wars to protect our secrets against other nations.

HermanTheGerman

when 1 was 5 i went on my first holiday abroad to spain and i thought soon as i got there i could instantly talk spanish and will come back unable to speak english

joey.k

I used to believe that foreign languages used the same words as me only they used them differently (e.g. instead of calling a rabbit a rabbit they would call it a fork or something)

Anon

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

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

Lauren

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

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

sel

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

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.

I used to believe that people in foreign countries, china for example, made different sounds when then laughed. For instance, we would laugh like Ha Ha Ha and the would say chang chang chang.

im smart

Never could understand, as a kid, why learning foreign languages was such a big deal. All you had to do was to work out how other people arranged their alphabets.

For instance ABC in English might be UMJ in Italian. So an English 'cab' was an Italian 'jum'. Simple!

Neil

neilmarr

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

Debi