Un trilangeur? Pas completement!

Last week a French friend of mine came back to Wageningen to defend his PhD thesis, I had done some editing on his thesis , so there was both a personal and professional interest in attending his defense. (Two of the opponents said how well written the thesis was so I took more than a little professional pride in that). It was a good opportunity to (try to) exercise my (meagre) French again. I found that I was suffering from linguistic short circuits. Words that I used to know in French became transmuted into Dutch. For example 'almost", 'presque' in French, became transmuted into the Dutch ''bijna'. For F this was OK because he had done some Dutch language courses and was able to pick up the mistakes without flinching.

Come the day of the defense his father was there and picked up on the fact that I was the only person there who spoke reasonably fluent French (the sub text there is always "for an Englishman"). However my interjections of Dutch words into (hopefully passable) French sentences did keep him guessing about what I was actually trying to say.

French is an altogether difficult and different language to master. I have never fathomed the use of some subtleties about the use of French : for example the use of :
A). baisse et baisser (which mean a kiss or to fuck) has escaped me, (the recent movie "une baisse s'il vous plait" should have taught me this) but I still have not grasped the subtlety of whether I am asking a woman for a kiss or a fuck on a first date, which is a kind of critical nuance that can well influence whether or not it has a happy ending or results in having a glass of pastis splashed into your face.
B). Copin / copine and whether they refer to your good friends or to your lovers. Once at a market stall near Toulouse I clearly got the intonation wrong when looking to buy some chickens for the house of "mes copines". The poultry salesman looked at me with a mixture of jealousy and awe, and wondered whether to ask me if I really wanted another cock in the yard or what their adress was. Serious faux pas.
C. Using aimer (je t'aime, elle m'aime etc. ) in terms of I like/love you or she likes/loves me. This is a very hard gradation for anglophile to understand, maybe not so for the French.
D. Similarly I have never learned to distinguish between the spoken versions of la mort (death) and l'amour (love). When written the difference is clearly distinguishable, but when spoken there is less clarity. Perhaps such ambiguity is not unwarranted: love = death? Perhaps,the French do understand the ambiguities of life better than most other cultures .

A postscript . Some Dutch words come directly or indirectly from French. When I see them written down I am more familiar with the Franch prononciation than the Dutch (for example de file - the queue). Today my Dutch teacher told me I am the only Englishman he has met who speaks Dutch with a French accent. maybe I could audition for the Dutch version of 'ello 'ello.