Lingua French-a

You've finally arrived, you precocious little polyglot from middle America, you.  Armed with a suitcase you've packed, unpacked and repacked for the last 6 months, a brand spanking new passport (because our neighbors don't care), a Eurail Pass,  the required English/Your Second Language Here dictionary and/or app; and sporting a t-shirt with a maple leaf that screams "I'M AN AMERICAN TRYING TO NOT LOOK LIKE ONE", you have landed somewhere overseas (probably in Europe) where the primary language is not shared by Shakespeare and the commercial flight industry, ready to show off your 1-12 or so years of classroom grammar and of course study of relevant literature, encompassing fond memories of "Sur le pont d'Avignon", "Ist das nicht ein Schnitzelbank?", "Cielito Lindo" or the "Gena Krokodil Song" (I think that about exhausts the foreign languages taught in American schools).

I Don't Really Blog...

I'm still miffed about this.

A month ago, someone pointed out that my Facebook page indicated that I "know" French, and insisted after I didn't pass a "test" he gave me (translating a sentence involving a couple of different future tenses into French) that "Americans can't speak French" and "It always surprises me to see the difference between what people say they know and what they actually know."