foreign languages

Okies dokies, when I was SUUUUPERR little, I would run out in the backyard and scream "Chinese"; which for me was "CHONG CHING!" OR something like that; and I assumed everyone in China could hear me and would shout back something in "American".

I was so cool. =]

Does not speak Chinese.

I used to be 100% positive that everyone in the world thought in English. I did, so why wouldn't everyone else, right?

So, I'm at the store with my dad one day, and we stop next to a Hispanic lady who's talking to the guy with her in Spanish. I said "You think in English, so just talk in English, duh." (I was 5 or 6 at the time)

Well, the lady did understand English, and it took my dad some serious explaining to escape that situation!! :)

AUDREY

When I was little, my mother convinced me that putting 'el' in front of a word made it Spanish. (El I el was el easiy el fooled!)

Nadia

I thought that the word 'chicanery' was a racist slur against Mexicans until I heard it pronounced. Then I looked it up and realized it was a French word.

Soap

Until about 2nd grade, I thought they spoke Spanish in China.

Anon

When I was little my father wanted to teach me Cantonese, I refused to learn because I thought "Oh no, nobody is going to understand me. How will I communicate?"

Guest

Sometimes i would hear my mom speak German while talking on the phone with someone, since she is of German ancestry. The only languages I knew were English and Spanish(my dad is Mexican), so I thought she was just speaking in a made-up "secret code language", because she was talking about something secret that she didn't want me to know about.

Juan

I used to believe that the phrase "Mamma Mia" referred to a girl named Mia.

Anon

I used to belive when my parents talked a foreign language over our heads, it was actually just a "coded" version of my own language. I thought I just had to do something with my ears to understand it.

Tone

I beleived as a child that French people thought in English and then had to translate it to French before they spoke

Iscaboo

My mother is Dutch and when I was little she would occasionally teach me words. For some reason, I was convinced she had told me that "perpendicular" was Dutch for dinosaur. I even had my own little song for it.

Maya

I used to belive that english was the "default" language and that all other languages were made up for fun. I used to think people with British accents were speaking a new funny language!

Jessica of the USA

When I was 4 or 5 I read or was told that Adam gave all the animals their names (elephant, monkey, etc.), way back when in the garden of Eden. Then when I realized that other people speak different languages and don't use the same words we do in English, I wondered where they got their animal names from-- since they didn't speak English, they wouldn't use the "official" names that Adam had invented!

Liz C.

i used to think that all foreign people were actually english people, but that their government had come up with a secret code for everyone to speak so that we couldnt understand them

Anon

As a child, I was always confused seeing anywhere "SOS" (Save Our Souls) sign, because in my language "sos" means "sauce" - I remember I often asked my mom, why the hell the sauces are so popular on the ships since they mention so often about it!

Zgadnij gdzie mieszkam

When I lived in Brasil I thought that everyone in the world spoke Portuguese and that all the TV shows were Brasilian... When i moved to the U.S. at 5 y.o., little did i know that 'Pica Pau' was really 'Woody The WoodPecker'... I was devastated to find out that he was a fraud...

Flavia

My sister and her friend used to believe that there was no such thing as the language 'English', they thought they spoke 'American' and 'English' was some kind of gibberish.

Maddy

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!

Inci Palmer

When I went on my first trip to America aged 6 (I'm from England), on the plane ride there, I flashbacked to a previous trip to France, remembering how everyone spoke a different language and I couldn't watch the TV as I couldn't understand it. I paniced, I asked my mother 'What language do they speak in America? What if we don't understand it?' to which I was informed they speak English, like us, and that many of the cartoons I enjoyed such as Rugrats were in fact American. I always wondered why they had funny accents.

Anon

I used to believe that if you lived in America you spoke "American", and if you lived in England you spoke "English", so everytime someone said we spoke english I always said "No, we speak American!!"

Sarah