Parlez-vous anglais?

Not surprisingly a good deal of my time in France is spent improving my French.  Most days I get together with friends to do a "language exchange".   The idea is that you and and another individual get together and speak each other's language.  A typical meeting is a couple of hours with one hour in french and the other in English.  I love these.  It's a great way for me to get concentrated time with somebody who is in a similar place.  My language partner understands that I WANT to be corrected and is usually very patient with my American accent.  The conversations, of course, are whatever we want to chat about although they have a tendency to become Q&A on various cultural questions that each party is curious about.  I cannot believe how much I have learned about the french way of life from these fun talks.

What surprised me about language exchanges was how poorly equipped I was.  I don't mean my French. I mean my English. When I first started studying French it was quickly apparent to me that I had lost all consciousness of the English language.  Yes, I speak English but do I understand anything about it?   I had forgotten what an article was, much less had any concept of what the verb tenses were in English.  I understood NOTHING about English.  Thus, my concept of language got better rapidly when I started studying french.  In fact, it was one of the things that I found interesting about language study (most of learning a language is simply a brute force battle to convince your brain that the foreign words are worthy to use memory space).

So...I can tell you when to use the plus que parfait and on good days understand the strange rules for the subjonctif. But English? That’s another matter. I remember my first exchange rather well. My friend almost immediately said he was struggling with “when to use any vs. some” in English. Ha I said, this will be easy! Finally I’m a master at something here! However, I was almost immediately stumped. Um...”would you like some peanuts”...um...“Would you like any peanuts”...What IS the rule? I realized I did not have a clue. I am not equipped to teach somebody English. I could probably teach French much better than I could teach English.

Humbled...again.