language proficiency

I'm leaving Saturday for a trip to Argentina with some friends. We've been corresponding a bit with various hostel owners and tour operators, and have been a bit frustrated with the poor English that we've been encountering. It generally takes several back-and-forth emails to get any questions answered, and given that email response time is usually at least 24 hours (if not several days), it's been taking forever to get our plans finalized.

After spending a lot of time parsing a particularly cryptic email, in which the syntax barely resembled English, and several words were outright Spanish, I started to wonder what I'd sounded like when I was chatting with the French tourists in Vietnam last week. I've basically forgotten any tense except the present tense, and my vocabulary was never very good to begin with, so I describe lots of things in roundabout ways; I'll say "the meal we eat later" instead of "lunch" if I've forgotten "dejeuner", etc. I guess I should be grateful that they all humored me and continued to converse with me. In fact, several of them were quite pleased that I attempted any French at all.

Must remember to have patience with people's English next week.