For many students in the American school system, learning a second language is not a high educational priority. Unless a student is enrolled in a school that has a curriculum targeted towards learning a language other than English, acquiring a new language can be pretty hard. By the time I formally started learning French, the only other foreign language I knew was Spanish, pretty much at Dora the Explorer level. I started earnig French without knowing what to expect. And I did not know how much French I needed to retain to meet class expectations as the years went by. To be honest, I didn't really like learning it. Reading and writing wasn't too hard, when you consider how close English and French are in terms of the spelling and meaning of many shared words. It was the pronounciation that was tricky for me, making speaking and listening an uphill battle. Many people say that at some point a language is supposed to click for you, but after three years, all could think about was that I was only months away from never having to learn French again. Fortunately, I changed my mind about this!
When I decided to learn French more intensitvely and major in it college, I honestly didn't know if I could do it.
