I studied French for six semesters. I kept failing.

Joke's on you. I can do both those accents.

I am the world's shittiest polyglot. I lost a lot of my native language, turkish. I can get by. I speak english, but my accent is getting worse. I studied german in school for 5 years and forgot most of it. I live in the river plate, so the shitty amount of intermediate spanish I can speak has one of the worst accents for spanish, just behind tied first of caribbean and chilean. I can READ cyrillic, but not understand it, except few words whichever language has in common with languages I know. I can recognize some chinese glyphs, and understand some words.

I have no idea about any grammar words except the obvious ones (verb, noun) and get as much use of IPAs as I do IPAs (the pronunciation guide/the beer)

I have seen the vowel chart a billion times and still don't understand it.

US high schools will graduate students with missing elective credits. They won't allow a falling grade from that rite of passage. Administrators have the power to change a grade in spite of a teacher's documentation

Most people who take a language in school don't keep at it. We're just doing it because it's required, and to pass the class. I took French in high school. The only person I've ever met who spoke French fluently was my teacher. I really should have taken Spanish, but I wanted to be "different".

In Europe, also, because of the open borders, and being packed so close together, people encounter foreign languages far more frequently. It makes sense they'd all want to, and benefit from, knowing multiple languages. And, they'd have more opportunities to practice. Not many Japanese speak a second language, compared to Europeans, for instance.

Ah, ma petit chou... Voulez-vous couchez avec mois ce soir?

My school taught Indonesian. It was a very popular complaint among students that we should be learning a more ubiquitous language like French, German, Japanese, Mandarin, or Spanish.

The only thing I know in Indonesian is ular besar (big snake)

I got out of the language requirement in college by taking computer science courses, which counted as "language" only because programming languages are called what they are. It is just the dumbest fucking shit. If they were called "paradigms" or "code instruction sets" or something like that (which would be just as or more accurate than "languages") it never would have occurred to anyone to let us computer nerds -- who are already not exactly well-rounded in general -- to get out of learning a real fucking language.

I had a co-worker who took a few semesters of Spanish in high school, she got all As, and then went on a class trip to Mexico. At first, she couldn't understand a thing, but she said as she listened and tried, "something snapped" and suddenly she got it.

I took Spanish from age 12-22 and German from 18-23 and 29-31.

I speak both those languages, though my Spanish is rusty, because I moved to Germany and don’t have much contact with Spanish speakers.

Yritän oppia suomen, mutta unohdin harjoitella kuukausin ajan

(If I made a mistake tell me)

I took english in school, and I speak it all the time :3

I did but I had after-school classes because I sucked at taekwondo and football, lol. So I learned French and ended up moving to France, eventually becoming a national, and also learned English and ended up marrying a Brit. 🤷

Et bien vous savez quoi, on peut s’entraîner un peu. Pourquoi pas s’entraider? Je vous parle en français et vous me répondez en espagnol ?

Aaaaand that would be me

Countless hours of German and French and at best a few words remain

Time well spent?

I studied a book going over "chagatai tili" in highschool.

I remember absolutely 0 words or grammar.

Most people don't really understand how many total hours of purposeful learning and actual usage is needed to become proficient.

For Japanese, it typically takes people who can't already read 漢字 about 1,325 hours to reach N3 (conversational), and 2,200 for N2 (roughly business). That means if you want to get to N2 in only one year, expect to study like five to eight hours a day.

So don't feel too bad if you can't.

Or do, and use that frustration to motivate your study.