When I first arrived in Australia I went to a Primary (Elementary) school in which we learned Greek as an extra subject. In England I had never learnt another language. I enjoyed learning all the letters of the Greek alphabet, they were interesting to look at and it was so much more fun to say "alpha" as opposed to "ay". Unfortunately I hadn't quite grasped the concept that Greek was an entirely different language of its own with different words for different things. When I had to write a sentence out in Greek I simply transferred all the English letters in the sentence for Greek letters. The result was, of course, a highly amusing code for my teacher to puzzle out. Needless to say, I didn't learn much Greek.
A childhood belief about foreign languages

others believed things like this
- i used to believe all foriegn languages were greek if you learned greek you could speak them all
— pappy 6 27 35 - I used to believe that the red thing in the middle of a Greek olive was the pit.— Liz
- For a while I thought Anon was a name of an ancient philosopher. Probably Greek.— zeforeigner
- I used to believe that translating from language into language was only a matter of changing letters ! :) — EwS
- I used to believe, that I am able to speak every foreign language only by learning "their" alphabet.— matej
- I used to believe that foreigners' ears translated English words to their own languageAnon