[plainnoodles]

This is my experience as well. If you're just there to fulfill your credit hour obligations, you can squeak through managing to shield yourself from truly learning much of the language at all.

I think much of the value, though, is in the opportunity it affords people who find a passion in it. I really loved French in high school, and the combination of the support/resources it offered (a book, a teacher) and the regimen (I think French was either 3 or 5 times per week? I can't recall) was just right to let me learn as much as I wanted to, and also enough regimen to keep me coming back to it even if I wouldn't have otherwise necessarily felt like it if left to my own devices.