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.
I think you should be angrier at your mother dude. There’s only so much classes can do to help you learn a language, no matter how good they are.
I'd have appreciated if those classes had emphasized this point that they are only supplementary, but they didn't. I really thought I was going to be fluent by the end of the third year.
The result is I wasted 45 minutes a day for three years of my life learning something that I'd never have enough mastery in to serve any sort of function in my adult life.
That's kinda fucked up. You can still learn, just use Comprehensible Input resources (like Dreaming Spanish) instead of the "blue-pill" crap like classes.