foreign languages

When I was in elementary school kids were offered an after school program to learn Spanish as a second language. But because they just said they had Spanish after school, I thought Spanish was like an extra help class to learn something like math.

Anon

i used to live in chile, south america and only spoke spanish so whenever my parents would try to talk to eachother in a way that i couldnt understand they spoke in English (which i didnt no til i was like 9) so i thought that evreyone could understand those words..i was so surprised when i moved to Washington, USA.

hersheykisses083

I used to think that when everyone was born they spoke english and had to be taught the other language by their parents.

Anon

In the third grade (age eight) I began French classes at my elementary school. Every season we got some vocabulary to study and some worksheets to do (example: Easter we learned 'lapin', 'eouf', and 'printemps') from our teacher Mme Luc. We also did oral exercises to help us with pronounciation.

By Hallowe'en (still near the beginning of the term), I was terrible at pronounciation. When we did the oral exercise, we were given simple Frech sentences to read ('the flower and the cat', 'In my house', etc.).

Mine was 'Mme Luc et le bougie' which means: Miss Luc and the candle. I said,

"Madame Luc eats bogeys"

Marshmello Da Strawberry Cow

Coming to the states when I was four, I thought English was jibberish. So people always talked "jibbierish" so I joined in. Man I must have looked dumb.

wadawadabingbnag

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

my mother tongue is not english. and at home my parents spoke this language amonst each other. me and my brother did not have a clue what was going on, but we picked it up slowly. when we didnt know how to speak it, and when we used to play mommy and daddy, we made up our own gobbledygook version and pretended that we knew what it meant and spoke it infront of our parents so they would get jealous!!

Mommy&Daddy Games

Because of Pocahontas, I grew up believing Native Americans noises sounded like English to Native Americans.

Anon

Being Canadian, I assumed that every country had two official languages; I deduced that the official languages of the USA must be English and Spanish. I'm not sure when I was disabused of this notion.

Matt

When we used to go to Germany my dad told me about 'oerworms' (earworms) which means wen u get a song stuck in your head. until i was 14 i used to think earworm was a real english word. now i think bout it i must have confused a lot of people.

Jamie

I'm Russian. When I was 5 my family moved to Germany cause my father worked at the embassy there and I had to learn to speak German at the kindergarden. So when we came back to Russia and went to the seaside in the South on holiday I assumed that whenever you travel somewhere you have to learn the language they speak there. So naturally I decided to start with the basics and asked my father what the 'southern' for 'thank you' was.

Mary

My Father used to call my mother "Viega"
pronounced "Vi-eh-ha", which means "Woman" in spanish, and I used to belive my moms name was "Vieja"

Domingo

When I was a child, my parents, who could not speek English very well, had a friend named "Anjelita" and being being in school only speaking Enlish, I thought that this friend of the family was actually my "Aunt Helita", Later in life I asked my mom " Have you heard from my Aunt Helita?" and I got a look from her that in my mind said "What the Hell are you taliking about?" then I told her and she set me straight, heheheh

The Boogieman

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

WhenI was a young boy I belived that after the Normans conquored England, English completly transformed to become a Romance language. This theory persisted until I was 9 when upon looking at a Linguistic table, I learned that it [English] was a Germadic language.

Ilya

My son once told me. "Dad, I can speak spinash!". To it I replied "I speak carrot".

Anon

I thought that even though different languages were written differently, that they were all said the same. I was so adamant about it that I got my mom to write out the alphabet and then write down which letter in German meant which letter in English, but she didn't quite get what I meant and it didn't end well.

Callie

I was just reading some beliefs and I was getting a little curious about this "Anon" that kept posting (and I wasn't sure if that person was man or woman)..so I clicked on the name and it said "I'm sorry this is an ANONymous post"!!! (english is not my native language!). LOL!!!

josefina

This is a rather stupid one lol, but I used to think that foreign schoolkids, like ones from Kosovo or somewhere like that, would have to have 'special lessons' with speaking English. You get the idea.

Natasha

This is sad because I have Scottish ancestry from my paternal grandfather’s side. I used to believe Scottish was a language. I didn’t think British, Kiwi, Aussie or Canadian English were languages though.

Anon