I clicked on your story, because the title intrigued me. When I raised my foster son in Montreal, he and his friends really did speak a constant mixture of French and English, which some people call Franglish. While they carefully distinguished themselves as either francophones or anglophones, the truth was that they were all more or less bilingual, mostly more.

Your story is different, of course, but it reminds me of myself at the time. I was still learning french, and while I was picking up phrases pretty fast, using those phrases could get me in trouble. Because people would presume I knew more French than I did.

It took a lot of years for any kind of fluency to catch up with my phrase usage.

Fortunately, I had a lot of good friends like yours who were perfectly willing to put up with my learning process.