A childhood belief about foreign languages

English was my first language ... but until the age of five or six, I thought that everyone spoke it. The first time I heard someone speak a foreign tongue, I stared at them in disbelief until my mother told me about languages. But the idea of someone not speaking English was so alien to me - because the languages I overheard were utterly incomprehensible to my ears - that I figured that everyone speaking a foreign language simply MUST be at least thinking in English. They must be translating back and forth in their heads even as they speak German or Japanse or whatever, because how ELSE could they understand that strange gibberish coming from their mouths?

I immediately felt bad for them and thought I was lucky because I only had to think and speak English instead of worrying about translating words from foreign languages into English in my head.