Yeah, at least from my own experience, the way they try and teach students foreign languages while they're in school in this country is honestly really bad.
I remember in elementary school, I had Spanish class every year. Which you'd think would be great, especially with the (actually incorrect) belief that it's easier to acquire a second language in your youth vs when you're an adult. But it wasn't because Spanish class was part of what my elementary school called 'specials', which was basically different classes you'd take once a week like PE, computer class, art class, (more in-depth) math class, etc. but Spanish class alternated with music, so I'd only have Spanish once every two weeks and it never advanced in terms of what we were taught. I'm pretty sure everything I learned from Kindergarten to 5th grade amounted to: the numbers from 1-10, how to identify myself and where I live, and some colors. Oh and Simón dice (Simon says) since we played Simon Says in Spanish at the end of every class.
And then in high school (I took no foreign languages in middle school, guess they didn't give a toss about us retaining the limited Spanish we learned in elementary school, so they made it an elective), Spanish class was better than in elementary school, in the vague since that my teachers at least tried to teach stuff, but it was still really bad because, well, my first Spanish teacher in high school was from that very famous and well-known Spanish-speaking country of France. I am shitting ye not, he was born and raised in France but one of his parents was from Spain, so he spoke both French and Spanish as his native languages, but still. Then I got transferred to a different teacher who seriously expected us to be speaking only Spanish in the classroom by the end of the year and during the finals actually just gave us the answers to the Spanish final. I don't remember much of happened in my second year of Spanish class in school (yeah we only had to take two years) because it was just boring, I think the teacher would just give us worksheets to do and we'd watch movies and that was it.
At least nowadays I can choose to learn Spanish and French at my own pace and stuff, which is honestly great.
