language: foreign languages

When I was little, I moved, and started at a new school. My new french teacher, Madame Emmanuel, was really scary (at least to a 7 year old). We'd begin every class with her saying "Bonjour Classe!" and us responding "Bonjour, Madame Emmanuel!".

Me, not having much instruction in French, simply assumed that her name was "Madamy Mannuel", and wondered what kind of name Madamy was.

I grew up speaking French and English equally. At first, I didn't even realize they were different languages! But when I figured it out, I decided everybody must know one or the other.

At a restaurant one night, I decided to tell the people at the next table about my stuffed bunny rabbit, who was very smart, and had figured out how the desserts were made. (I think it involved bicycle pumps for the meringues.) But they didn't understand me, so I tried it all again in the other language, which only confused them even more! My mom came to get me, rescuing the poor Germans from the weird kid babbling at them in English and French.

Before I went to school, I used to believe that what ever marks I made with a pencil or pen were words written in another language. I used to scribble on a page in lines from left to right, and then look at it, wondering what in the heck I had just written.

when i was an innocent youth, i thought that foreign lagnguages all sounded enlish to forieners. so when french people spoke to eachother, wat sounded like forien to me, sounded like english to them.

English is not my native language, I started learning it when I was 10. Until high school, I used to believe that there was an English word "ough", which meant insufficient, and "enough" was its negated version.

As a child I knew that in Israel the language spoken was Hebrew. Since my exposure to Hebrew was limited to the chanting I heard at Synagogue, I assumed that in Israel people went around chanting to each other all day.

i used to believe that my parents can speak all the world languages... that´s because when i was a little boy (and i couldn´t tell one form another) so whenever i asked them which language the actors in movies are speaking the always gave me answer... so i thought they can simply speak all that languages

In a history class, actually we were fairly old, a girl in the back perks up in the middle of a discussion about one of the worl wars, and contribute to the conversation with this "Oh, do they speak english in Great Britain?"

When my brother was about 5 years old, he came to me asking why people spoke other languages. He had just assumed everyone thought in English but translated it into other languages in their heads before saying things.
It was really tough to explain that many of these people didn't know any English, much less think English thoughts.

When I came to the States, I was learning English in ESL English as a Second language) Program, and all the other students in the class were from different countries too. I couldn't hear the difference in pronounciation and spelling of the words 'shit' and 'sheet', 'ship' and 'sheep', and the worst of all 'skank' and 'skunk'!!! So I was using this words very wrongly among other students. Since they didn't know better, I kept on missusing the words until I asked my teacher a "shit" of paper in order to write the story of how I ran over a skank w/my car!

I used to bekeive philosiphy was a language, because my mom tought spanish and my dad taught philosiphy, and I would ask him things like "Say (so and so) in philosiphy.

Greets everybody! :)
When I was a lil kid, I used to believe that everybody's Hungarian, or at least, everybody on Earth speaks Hungarian as his/her mother tongue.
To understand this thing, first I should state that I am Hungarian. I thought that there were people from every in the world, but all of them spoke Hungarian among each other, but among the different nationalities and countries it had different official names, like English, German, etc .... Or actually, we call them that way .... But whose language it is, they call it Hungarian, so everybody has his/her own hungarian :)
How silly I was! :P
Goodbye!

I used to believe that because kids in school learned English, then kids in English-speaking countries would be learning my native language.

I used to think that people who spoke foreign languages only spoke them, but their thoughts were in english like mine.

I used to believe that foreign languages used the same words as me only they used them differently (e.g. instead of calling a rabbit a rabbit they would call it a fork or something)

When I was little, we had one of those potty-training books that tells the story of a little girl or boy that gets potty trained, gets their own potty, etc. The book's choice of words often confused me when I would read it because it used the word "urine" to refer to pee. I had never heard the word before, but I could tell that it referred to pee somehow. When my little sister asked me to read the book to her, she stopped me and asked what "urine" meant. I confidently told her that it was the Spanish word for pee. What a dope.