I think that's more to do with how we teach it and expect it be learned than the subject itself. I took 4 years of German in school and have almost nothing to show for it. I went to Germany for the first time recently and was only able to barely perform basic transactions, granted it's been 6 years since I've used it. But I started self-studying Japanese (and later Chinese) on the order of 30 minutes a day and was able to have conversations that lasted hours with multiple people at a bar in Taiwan after studying for just 2.5 years.
I went to "one of the best public schools" in America and have heard that college level language education isn't much better, so I think this is universally true of language learning classes in America.
The truth is that learning a foreign language is very "hard", where "hard" means requiring daily effort and willpower while often feeling confused and looking stupid while seeing little or no results for extended periods of time.
Generalizing this, I also thought I didn't like math until I went to university because all my math classes had been extremely boring and uninspiring. On a personal level, public school past the age of 14 was a massive waste of time and money.
Can second this. 5 years of French, it's even my neighbor country, and I can't have any meaningful conversation. It's been over a decade though.
French has always been that thing you had to do for school, there was no motivation or interest in it, especially at that age. Otoh I took a three month crash course in mandarin and could have very simple conversations about the weather, food and family with actual native speakers.
Obviously I totally regret how absolutely inefficient I was at learning French because today I agree with what the article touches on: Learning a language is good for your brain, you not only discover structures and ways to express yourself in ways that weren't possible in your mother tongue. You find that some concept is really easy to express in that foreign language but not your own, or vice versa. Words that don't exist in your mother language etc. That is not to say learning other things (like math) doesn't have positive effects on your brain, but the article seems to limit the usefulness of learning a language directly to the utility value of speaking it.
I went to "one of the best public schools" in America and have heard that college level language education isn't much better, so I think this is universally true of language learning classes in America.
The truth is that learning a foreign language is very "hard", where "hard" means requiring daily effort and willpower while often feeling confused and looking stupid while seeing little or no results for extended periods of time.
Generalizing this, I also thought I didn't like math until I went to university because all my math classes had been extremely boring and uninspiring. On a personal level, public school past the age of 14 was a massive waste of time and money.