I thought that people who spoke foreign languages would always learn English, and that dictionaries were only printed translating their language to English, so if someone who spoke French wanted to know the German word for something, they would first use a French-English dictionary, then a German-English dictionary, because French-German dictionaries didn't exist.

Luke Barber

when I was just a little girl, we had the classic video of "the Wizard of Oz", but it had no suntitles (and english is not my first language). So I saw the video with my dad to explain to me, and at the end, when when the lion sings his kings' song, I asked him what the song is about. He told me he don't know, 'coz the song is in lions' language (and I stopped asking).

Dar-U-la

I always thought that since babies could not talk proper English, they talked Japanese and babies from Japan talked English.

Person

I took Spanish in elementary and I got the idea in my head that Spanish people laughed in Spanish.

Woah, too many 'Spanish's.

Maddy

i used to believe that you could learn foreign languages by subsituting foreign letters with english letters. For example bonjour = good day, so ... b=g, o=o, j=d ...

Anon

When I was around 7 I thought that you were born speaking a certain language. So when my baby sister was born I used to sit next to her waiting for her to talk. When my mom asked me what I was doing I said that I wanted to know if she was going to talk english or spanish! My mom still makes fun of me for that and i'm 15 now!

Lupita

When I was little (1-5), I had a babysitter who would always write in these squiggly lines (now I know it to be cursive). I always thought that she wrote in her own different language, and was astounded when other people could read her writing.

Joe

I am from The Netherlands and I thought all babies were born speaking dutch, so it was extra hard for babies outside The Netherlands to learn to speak, because they would have to learn a different language. I felt sorry for them!

Alexandra

In Belgium, when a public holiday falls on a Thursday or Tuesday, some companies try to allocate an extra day off on Friday or Monday, thus bridging the public holiday and the weekend making an extra long weekend.
Literally translated you would hear people ask and tell each other :
"We build a bridge on Friday, do you?"
Imagine my excitement when I thought my parents were building bridges all over the country! My friends were all in awe as well!

Dominik

I used to think that every language used a different alphabet. Once I was in Frankfurt on stopover. All the airport signs had the german on the top and the english on the bottom. So i thought the german words were just english adjectives, despite the fact that the two languages were distinguisehed by different colors. Plus it did not help much that i did not see any signs that read a german word with umlauts over certain vowels or that letter which looks like a beta. Anyway I came across a sign for baths, and the german for bath is "Bad" (also in plural form). And since the german was over the english, I thought it was a place where you take not-so-good baths. Soon I joked, "you take bad baths in germany and good baths in america." I ended up taking german in college to fulfill the language distrbution requirement. I shared that story with my classmates and my instructors.

ich bin ein dumkopf

I used to believe when I was 5 or 6 that if you kept talking with a stronger and stronger accent that eventually your words would come out in a different language.

sadly disappointed

When I was in Kindergarten I came home and told my mom that there was a French girl in my class. Come to find out she was actually Vietnamese... although my Grandmother likes to say that I was just exceptionally bright seeing as the French once occupied Vietnam.

Alicia

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

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

When I was young, I used to love Sesame Street and the small bits of Spanish they taught you. So when I was about five I knew that 'hola' meant 'hello'. So one day I asked my mom if there were any more ways to say hello. So she explained to me that almost every country had it's own language and own way to say hello. She then gave me examples of other languages...in Germany they speak German, in Japan tey speak Japanese, and so on. I listened intently, and replied: "Oh. We just speak regular here, right?"
Typical American kid :-)

Jacki

When I was young, I though the actors and actresses should be able to speak in all languages, because I had seen the Dallas in Turkish, English, German and Arabic TV...

sel

I used to think that the British were very snobbich, because they thought they were too good to make the "long e" sound.

I had yet to discover what accents were.

Scix

I used to believe that to speak Spanish all you had to do was a an "o" to the end of each word.

!!.-ariel-.!!

I used to think, that children in different countries laugh in different way, just because they spoke different languages.

Joanna

When I was about 8 I had never heard a foriegn language before so I thought that when it finally did happen the sounds of their language just wouldn't register so all I would hear is buzzing.

Anon