I've said it before and I'll say it again. Doing all this work on Italian is really helping my French! I have French people crawling out of the woodwork to speak with me.
OK, so what have I done? Not a lot to be honest. I've got 39 hours and 18 minutes of LR in Italian, and I've managed a 58-day streak of Clozemaster. My Anki deck is only 60% (18 days out of 30) in the last month, but every little helps they say.
I did a French language exchange tonight, and we spoke for about 1.5/2 hours (I wasn't really paying attention, we just sort of switched after about 30 minutes and carried on in French). I didn't have any major problems, there were a couple of phrases I didn't understand but didn't ask for clarification because they didn't seem important and I didn't want to interrupt her. A couple of times when it was important I did interrupt and get an explanation. (Actually she just repeated it slower, she didn't explain anything) and we carried on. So I'm feeling pretty comfortable with French when speaking with someone I know, and after a "warm-up" period of 3-5 minutes. How I would do in France speaking to strangers might be different, don't know yet.
The English conversation was mostly about what we'd done in the last month, but the French conversation was a bit more varied since we'd already covered the recent past. We talked about why we spoke to the LE partners we spoke with. For example, I said I enjoyed speaking with an Italian lady who mostly talked about dancing. She loves salsa, and other Latin dancing, and she tells me about her nights out. My French partner told me she likes speaking to a lady from Boston (USA not the original) because this American lady is always trying to learn very advanced French vocabulary and then forces my French LE partner to speak about complex topics in English.
I said she must enjoy talking with me because; Je parle en française comme un vache espagnol. Also, we tend to talk about simple subjects. This caused a rather loud exclamation, and she laughed and reminded me when I had to describe how an aeroplane flies in French, and I'd made her describe the costumes of people in a photo of Comic Con, or the time I asked her how she trained people with speech problems to overcome neurological impairments after a stroke. (Yeah, we talk about strange stuff.) Tonight we talked about slang "du fric", "un flic", "il est très friqué", which then lead to a discussion of profanity in French, English, Norwegian, and Spanish.
I suppose what I am saying is I appear to have emerged into a stage with my French where it doesn't disappear and leave me high and dry. Now after a little warm-up it comes out to play and isn't all grouchy and silent. I'm still rubbish at French spelling, pronunciation, grammar, and just about everything else. But I can talk to people, I can understand (mostly) and no matter how crap my pronunciation they (mostly) understand me. Which really is a result, and has only taken 10-12 years.
Now, I'm beginning to think I'm actually good at French. Why suddenly do I think I'm getting good at French? Because now, when I get things wrong, people start correcting my grammar and give me long lectures about when I should use passé composé, or passé simple, or imparfait. They used to give me these lectures before, but now they give them to me in French.
