language: foreign languages

i used to belive that English wasa THE frist langudge, and every other country coppied off of us, and that we were the origanal and only ours counted, and no other one was real. they just jibber jabbered...

I used to believe that if you knew a single word of any language, you were automatically descended from it. So I say, "I'm part English, Arabic, Spanish, Portugese," and the list goes on. That was until Mom correct

Although I must have known from television and general life that Americans spoke English, I managed to convince myself, and my friends too, that they spoke an entirely different language. My father used to go on frequent business trips to America, and when he came back, I would tell my friends that he had taught me something new about the American language. I even claimed to have been taught several songs in 'American' which I performed for them - they were complete gibberish, of course.

Given the amount of American TV shows we get in the UK I don't know why I thought this would be convincing, nor why the other children believed. It never fails to surprise me, either, that I half believed these fantastic tales myself.

Since I couldn't make any sense of what babies were "saying" when they were babling, I was convinced when I was a child that American babies must speak Chinese. Likewise I concluded that Chinese babies must speak English.

I used to believe that since every country had their own language; everybody laughed differently.. Yea... The Swedes laughed different from the danish and so on.. I was pretty disappointed when we first went on holiday to Sweden.... Lisa-Norway

When I was 7 we moved to Malaysia. Before we left my mum told me that they speak a different language over there. I just assumed that meant that they spoke in opposites.

I did French Immersion (half day English, half day French) all through elementary school, and remember thinking that French was pretty much like English except with a different pronunciation. So art was art, science was science, musique was music, hygiene was health (it was just a more flowery term.) It took me awhile to accept that I was just learning plain old spelling and not the ancient and revered discipline of orthography.

i thought i could speak my own language because when i spoke in this language to my friend he wud talk bak the same i thought id invented a language until i tried speaking to my dad like that and he didnt replay.

i used to believe that you could learn foreign languages by subsituting foreign letters with english letters. For example bonjour = good day, so ... b=g, o=o, j=d ...

When I was a kid, a newspaper published the Russian Alphabet. I thought I was very clever in substituting the letters of English words with the Russian equivalent.... to this day, I blush when I am reminded of it, as I told everyone I could now speak/write Russian!

I used to believe that "Hazchem" was a German word meaning "danger" (hence the signs up at factories etc).

I was 21 before I figured out, all by myself at least, that it was an abbreviation for "hazardous chemicals".

I used to think that saying "I can't speak Spanish" meant that you literally couldn't make the words come out of your mouth (something like how Jim Carrey couldn't lie in the movie Liar Liar.) I pictured people like grabbing their throats and trying to choke the words out.

When i was 10 i believed door mats that said welcome, meant i will eat you in latin , So iwould run away in fright the end.

I used to believe that people who spoke other languages thought in English, hence in Germany a guy would say to another guy "Guten tag" and the other guy would think "Okay, um, Guten Tag means Good day."

Filipino people here often mix English with their Tagalog. So I came to the conclusion that Filipino people only created half a language and got lazy, so they took English to fill the rest.

I used to believe that English and Farsi (my native language) were the only languges that exsisted and people that spoke a different language were stupid and they were just speaking jibberish