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'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.