Good at French?

Shortly after the end of my school days, I went on a trip to Southern Europe with a couple of friends. On our way, we stopped at a place in France and stayed with a French family for the night. After we had exchanged a few sentences, the hostess turned to me and said how good she thought my French was. My friends’ reaction: peals of laughter. They knew what she did not know: one of my friends had grade 2 at French at school, the other friend had grade 1, I had grade 5. Two things, I think, can be derived from this: First, native speakers tend to overrate pronunciation. If your pronunciation is reasonably good, your foreign language competence is usually thought better than it actually is. Proper pronunciation seems to be more important than grammatical accuracy or lexical precision. Second, the requirements of the school system are different from the requirements of small talk in everyday situations, and they have to be.