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 did. I live in an area where virtually nobody speaks Spanish. We don't even have a very big Latin American descent population. I was forced to take the class in my senior year of high school, when I had no interest. So thus, I then got even LESS interest in learning the language.