foreign languages

i used to be confused about people who grew up ijn a different country, learning to speak another language fluently to live in that country. I wondered if they were amoung english people whether they'd think in english, or their native language

What do you think?

I used to belive that the whole world spoke english. When i would see other people speaking something that was not english I thought that those people were just retarded and had no brain.

Anon

One day in history class my friend tell's me she is going to spain and i said "oh yeah the place where they speak spanish." and then i said "so that means that people in mexico speak mexican right?" my friend says no thats not right. She tells me that mexican is not a language. This happened 3 weeks ago. Im 14 and in the 9th grade. YOU WILL HAVE TO FORGIVE ME I'M BLONDE

MEXICAN???????

My mother language is Malay and English is the second. I wasn't good at it through my childhood and kept making my british cousins laugh when I say 'vegetable' or 'their'. I didn't know that I'm not suppose to say them literally as in the written form.

Syakira

My cousin & I were the 2 oldest, we began speaking our own language he was 11 and i was 7. We really thought we understood eachother, and we really thought we were speaking spanish. To this day we don't know what the heck it was! Our family loves to tell that story.

sl

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

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?"

Anon

I used to beleive that Spanish was just English spelled backwords.

srj

Growing up in Southern California, my brother and I used to believe that every foreign language was Spanish and thus anyone not speaking English was speaking Spanish.

Tanda

English is not my primary language, but I used to believe that people on T.V. uses our country's language, Tagalog.

Herbert R. L.

My maternal grandparents are Russian immigrants, but we all live in an English-speaking country. They would babysit me when I was little, and they would speak Russian to me all the time. As a result, I understood both English and Russian, as does my mother. But for the first few years of my life, I didn't understand that they are different languages, and sometimes I'd talk to my father in Russian and think he was stupid for not understanding

Anon

When I was really young, I thought pop stars sang only in English, or else Spanish. (I'm from Texas.) I was in junior high when I started finding out about rock in other languages. Now I'm 26 and think that foreign-language pop is the greatest thing.

Hilary the Baker

I used to think that every language used a different alphabet. My family is indian,and the languages spoken in india for the most part did not use the same alphabet. When I was around 8 or 9, i found out that French, german, spanish, italian, swedish, polish, etc also use the roman alphabet.

Anon

When I was young I thought that people from foreign countries that spoke a different language still thought in English.

Rachel

Whenever I heard someone speaking Spanish, it sounded like giberish to me, so I'd speak random giberish and say it was "Spanish"

Amanda

I used to belive that everyone spoke the same language. i thought the people talking in different languages were just talkng jibberish.

Andrew

i used to think that people who spoke foreign languages or had different accents had something mentally wrong with them.

Anon

As a French, when I was young, I thought every body spoke French at birth, and that people in other countries had to learn another language very early. I felt pity for them, and I was so proud for myself! This belief was supported by the fact that the first language the speakers use in the Olympic Games (on tv) is French : it's why I thought it was the first language at all.

Aude

I believed until about age six that all Black people could speak Spanish.

Alan

Not that I was racist when I was young, but I used to think that Spanish and Chinese were the exact same thing.

JRE1