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 swear that there's gotta be something in human brains where some people just "can't get it". Mandatory two years of high school Spanish, I could kinda read it okay, but I couldn't really get the hang of speaking it.
Definitely doesn't help that I didn't have any Spanish speaking friends and public speaking (which was a big part of my classes) was very anxiety inducing.
(Anecdote time) I've got a sister-in-law who's not a native Spanish speaker but is pretty fluent, (maybe she majored in it college too, can't remember). She tried to teach her kids for a while but stopped after noticing that they would get so frustrated/confused at trying to switch between English and Spanish.
I really wonder what would have happened if there was language classes that just started in kindergarten and lasted until the end of high school.
Honestly it's just really hard to do in the classroom. It's not really a "subject" that you can sit down and learn through lectures and tests, it's a skill you need to actively train your brain for for an extended period of time through real-world practice. 20 kids sitting down while a teacher instructs them isn't going to be effective for most people to learn a new language