totally. there was a brief moment in the 80s that my crappy public school taught us spanish for a few hours a week. that lasted like a year before the program was killed off. i know there are like bilingual public schools and stuff now that teach spanish in certain parts of the US, because my nephew is in one. but like, it’s all optional so of course chuddy gringo parents rail against it and make sure most public schools at the elementary level are monolingual.

the only other chances i’ve had to practice spanish were making friends with some guys in high school who taught me slang, and later working an underpaid physical labor job and practicing basics with some co-workers who wanted to also practice their english. i did some audio conversational lessons on my own and have traveled to immerse in spanish speaking countries when i could, but my spanish is like tragic. and now i work in a more professional/office type of set up, where most everyone in a monolingual bozo. we had an azeri guy for a short while, and i made it a point to learn some basic please/thank you/greeting phrases, which were fun to use. of course no one else could be bothered.

he and i used to talk about rural american english dialects, because he was london educated and found the speaking style of rural america confusing/amusing.

if i were running shit, US public schools would have mandatory spanish language education k-12 with the expectation that everyone had to be bilingual and literate in both languages. the striving play heads could stack on that with like mandarin and french and whatever else, but really we should be all capable of spanish and english here.

but i imagine that kind of program would really piss off the chuds.

Plus, the years when you have peak language learning ability are also the years when you don’t have any control over what you learn

This is a myth, adults are better at learning languages than children.