Haha, this is really just a joke, but I suppose we'll entertain this thought enough to actually pique the curiosity of any who wander into here of their own free will (as opposed to us "hijacking" threads, as it was well stated in the PitSuccess thread.

by the way, I'm not fluent, and won't claim to be, so people like vincentL or others who really are fluent may feel free to correct anything that gets said in here :P They're word is final!

haha, and simply because avinashv asked if this was correct, I'll respond:

Pretty close;  Usually, when "il y a" means ago , it gets placed at the end of the clause it resides in, though it may show up at the beginning if you want to express it that way.  I'm sure there are some mumbo jumbo rules about it, but it's nothing too intense.  Treat it like the english "ago"; it's positioning is determined the same way as in english, depending on the thought you're trying to express.  Here though, I'd say that the preferred expression would be something to the effect of "Ça fait 5 ans depuis..." (literally That/It makes 5 years since) versus the "il y a" construction.  The rest of the sentence wasn't bad.

If it were me speaking, I'd have said the following:  "Ça fait 5 ans depuis que j'ai eu un converation, proprement dit, en français."  I added the proprement dit as a mutation of your propre, but there was nothing really wrong with your way.  Good job on the addition of "que" after the word "depuis."  The technical rule, put into TLS's words, is that you have to add the "que" after linking words like depuis, pendant, pour, avant, sans, but you only do so if there is a noun and a verb performed by said noun.  You may leave off the "que" if there is only a noun or noun clause.  Be warned that in certain cases, adding "que" will trigger the subjunctive mood in the follow verb.

One final thing though-- because french (and other languages too) is so particular about it's gendre matching, the phrase "C'étais bonne" needs to go to "C'étais bon", as the subject ce (this/it) is masculin, and overrides the real noun of which we speak of in conversation (ie, the one it's replacing for the sake of being less repetitious).  So, if we were talking of "une phrase" (a phrase, sentence), even though it's feminin by definition, if we were to refer to it by "ce", we must now follow the gendre of "ce", and not "phrase".  The only way to really keep the gendre intact is to continue to refer to the feminin noun by "elle" (the pronoun for "she", though it may also speak of feminin nouns).  Thus, we could say "La phrase, elle est belle."  The french like to use vocabular emphasis, like repeating pronouns a few times in the same sentence, or even using both the real noun's name followed by the pronoun of it's gendre, like in the sentence I just used.  We could have just said "Elle est belle", but we risk being misunderstood if there is a female standing in the group, or if the topic of the conversation isn't clearly understood.  That being said, the french like to be repetitious no mater what the case is 

Thanks for the clarification.

Where did you learn French?  You have a deep understanding of the grammar, and based on what I've seen here, it's past the general level of fluency of college-level language requirements.

I studied French in primary school, and by the grade I had done college-level French.  However, when I went to middle school, French started with no assumed knowledge.  Once I finished the general requirements for a second language under the British education system, I was at less than where I left off in sixth grade.  Now, after two years of college, I'm taking French again, but a class that covers a lot of ground from scratch in 4 months...sort of an accelerated program.  It's currently so balls-easy so I'm either not going to class or sleeping during it.  I think we might start the past tense tomorrow .

I studied french in middle school for a little tiny while, but it was useless.  I forgot everything but the verbs être and faire by the time I left for Canada.  I learned everything I know while I was there.  Sure, the environment wasn't the best for learning good grammar and good accent and such, but I wasn't there to learn the Québecois french; I went to learn some real french while I was at it.

I studied every day for 2 years   After a while though, I stopped studying it as much, and picked up books on Japanese.  I had learned japanese a bit before I left, but nothing to let me communicate.  Once I was in Canada, I began using french as a medium to learn Japanese.  I used to swear to myself that I would never do such a thing, as it seemed too hard, but after about a year of time in Québec, I began buying books written in french for the purpose of learning Japanese.  It's been a lot of fun.  I like knowing how a language works, and I like really learning it, and not just doing a crappy job.  If I'm going to know it, then I'm going to know it dangit, not just think I know it!  It keeps me busy.  I'm not perfect with the grammar, but I've figured out a lot of things that I've noticed about the language.

anyway, that's that.  I'm going to take some tests when I start up university again and see if I can't test out of some classes and get credit for it.