I took three years of Spanish and got an A every semester. Even when it was still fresh in my mind, I was nowhere near able to hold even a very simple conversation. And now just a few years later it's all totally gone from my brain.
My mother's native language is Spanish and she never taught me, which I resent her for. But I still find it incredible how shitty my public school education in Spanish was. We really should be teaching kids a second language from kindergarten up.
Yeah, I get that. I wish public school education would take it more seriously and not relegate it to just a couple years in High School, because it's really important for people to be bilingual, and we can't expect children to recognize how important it is on their own.
That said, I should not have gotten an A every semester with the level of fluency I had. I definitely put in enough effort to receive a passing grade, but that was only enough to ask simple questions like "where is the restroom?" or being able to pick out a few key verbs and nouns from a spoken sentence. Had I received a lower grade, I may have recognized I needed to try harder.