[iforgotpassword]

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.