foreign languages

When I was younger, I used to think that just by saying any random word that one of those words was bound to be a real word in some country.

Kel

A variation on the substitution theme: my family moved to Japan from California when I was seven. In Japanese class, they handed out a pronunciation chart for Hiragana, so I thought if I wanted to write in Japanese I just had to use these new characters instead of the latin alphabet.

Anon

When I was younger, I would listen to English people talking on TV [My first language is French] and then tried to immitate them...but I didn't know how to speak English and I noticed that they put lots of "hmmmm"s in their sentences, so I thought that if I say random stuff and pretend to speak English and put "hmmmm" anywhere I wanted, I would be able to speak English. So it would sound like "asdfkjanskjnfaen hmmmm....faoinweofinasdf hmmm....asldfoaind hmmm..." and on and on. I feel stupid now that I think about that.

'Hmmm'

i used to be confused about people who grew up ijn a different country, learning to speak another language fluently to live in that country. I wondered if they were amoung english people whether they'd think in english, or their native language

What do you think?

i used to belive that in everyones head they understood english, like if they heard a different launguage and inside their head they changed it to english to understand it, thusfor all other languages were just made to confuse people, and i thought that i was super lucky to understand and speak english. my mum never did get why i kept asking "why is it that people have to speak other languages when brains speak english??" to this day she doesn't understand it.

L

WhenI was a young boy I belived that after the Normans conquored England, English completly transformed to become a Romance language. This theory persisted until I was 9 when upon looking at a Linguistic table, I learned that it [English] was a Germadic language.

Ilya

i thought that japanese words were exactly the same as english words only they used characters to write them out instead of letters. if only it were that easy ... ^_^;;

neko

I used to believe that there is not only one english or one french language but that they're mixes.
Only German would speak german german but not the english english but german english.

Hm it's hard to explain. :)

TE

When I first took spanish, I thought "Yo tengo una pregunta" meant "tanto with a pregnant woman"

Lisa

When I was little (and embarrasingly enough up until I was 21 yrs old) I used to think that everyone was born speaking English. If they lived in Japan, Spain, Austria, or any place where English is not the first language, the person then had to learn how to speak that language - like reprogramming themselves.

Anon

I used to believe that the word "english" was a universal word meaning "your language" so therefore i would assume that the subject english at school meant we are learning to speak and understand our own language better. So I therefore assumed that when people from another country (eg. France) were taught French at school, they were being taught their English.

MandaMoo

This one girl in my spanish class thought that "Caliente" was a bad word for some reason ... she would go around screaming "CALIENTE! CALIENTE! You're a caliente"

pood

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

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

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