foreign languages

I used to believe that other languages were like codes and to learn a language you just had to work out what the code was (i.e. every English J translated to an French U, or something) and then you'd be set.

What a surprise I got when started leaning French when I was 11!

Ruby

I used to beleive that Spanish was just English spelled backwords.

srj

i grew up speaking spanish. and when i was little, i used to think that english words were the same spanish ones, just spelled backwards.

padawan

As a French, when I was young, I thought every body spoke French at birth, and that people in other countries had to learn another language very early. I felt pity for them, and I was so proud for myself! This belief was supported by the fact that the first language the speakers use in the Olympic Games (on tv) is French : it's why I thought it was the first language at all.

Aude

i used to think that people who spoke foreign languages or had different accents had something mentally wrong with them.

Anon

One day in history class my friend tell's me she is going to spain and i said "oh yeah the place where they speak spanish." and then i said "so that means that people in mexico speak mexican right?" my friend says no thats not right. She tells me that mexican is not a language. This happened 3 weeks ago. Im 14 and in the 9th grade. YOU WILL HAVE TO FORGIVE ME I'M BLONDE

MEXICAN???????

I used to belive that the whole world spoke english. When i would see other people speaking something that was not english I thought that those people were just retarded and had no brain.

Anon

as a child i firmly believed that accents counted as languages. so for the first eight years of my life i spoke Derby and if anyone asked me if i spoke English i would deny it compleatly! i was always amazed at my cousin who could speak both Derby and English lol

kitkat

I used to believe that the Pakistanian was a joke. Like some kind of language to be laughed at. I thought you could speak it by saying gibberish. Me and my friend used to talk to eachother in 'Pakistanian' all the time.

"Bugoober globbity blooboo beefeefeem buh glah?"

Lecia

I used to think that people only heard different languages differently, but didn't speak them differently. I thought all of the same words were coming out of our mouths, but my ears just couldn't hear the words right if they were coming out of a foreign person.

Patrick

I used to think that if only you listened closely and intensely enough you would be able to understand any language automatically without learning it. I remember on holiday a German girl came up to me and started talking. She ran away after I had spent a few minutes leaning towards her , hands behind my back with an intense look of concentration on my face.

Anon

When I was about four I was OBSESSED with Egypt for some reason and I would never shut up about it. I remember saying I could speak Egyptian but it was really just random made-up nonsensical words but I kept saying it was Egyptian. I misheard "quiet" on a movie as "quegion" (pronounced like equation without the e) and I kept saying "quegion" was the Egyptian word for "quiet."

Anon

I used to believe that the whole world uses my linguage (I am from Croatia). I used to believe that everyone think in croatian. :) And then translate it to their linguage. How stupid, ha? ;)

Kuhacha

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