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 took two years and the full time teachers I had both years were basically Peggy Hill, then partway through the second year, that teacher went on maternity leave and our long term sub was a native speaker who grew up in Baja California and immigrated, and it was crazy how quickly my fluidity and pronunciation/accent improved over that span, and I pretty much totally lost those gains afterwards and now I can’t even roll R’s right.
I still remember enough to follow along to Spanish broadcasts of Dominican/Venezuelan Winter League baseball in the MLB off-season when I’m itching for some
but I can’t even hold simple conversation in Spanish anymore and there was a window where I felt like I was approaching fluency rapidly when I was a teenager and that just bums me out now
Understanding Caribbean sports commentator Spanish is something to be very proud of. Some native speakers can’t do it, even!
Haha, it’s mostly just knowing baseball well and what commentators are usually saying at any given time and then cross referencing that against my limited vocabulary, but it’s fun and useful to be able to parse really rapidly talking native speakers with accents you don’t normally hear locally.
(Random aside, but one of the Dominican teams has a deal with a sponsor that sells cranes and industrial vehicles, and every time they make a pitching change, there’s a “brought to you by” animation of the crane plucking the old pitcher off the mound and swinging over and dropping him in the dugout that cracks me up every time)