foreign languages

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.

Anon

When I was little, I thought that everyone was born knowing english, but had to learn the langauge in which they lived to 'fit in' and 'be normal'

Ann-onymous

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.

Jared

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

Lisa

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.

Anon

I used to believe that words that rhyme in my languaje must rhyme in other languages too!

Tonatiuh

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.

Anon

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.

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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 ...

Anon

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!

Donny

I used to believe speaking other languages than english we just because people were to stupid to speak english.

Anon

I took Spanish in elementary and I got the idea in my head that Spanish people laughed in Spanish.

Woah, too many 'Spanish's.

Maddy

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.

Jen Compton

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."

Currently bilingual

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.

Taglish

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

Anon

When i was about 4 i was on a boat in a childrens play room and there was a a girl there talking french. I tryed copying what i thought she was doing, talking giberish once i was done she slaped me. I have a feeling i actualy said something, but it wasnt very nice though.

bob