I took four semesters of French in undergrad (U.S.) from zero knowledge. I went to a small, rural high school that only had the budget for a Spanish teacher. I

I took four semesters of French in undergrad (U.S.) from zero knowledge. I went to a small, rural high school that only had the budget for a Spanish teacher. I decided I would've preferred French had I been given the choice so I switched when I made it to college. I met and in some ways exceeded the level of proficiency the author noted. In a lot of ways, this was out of necessity because I would've otherwise been quickly left behind. Based on what the author shared about his own proficiency, I suspect the primary difference for me is grammatical. Ironically, this whole endeavor improved my English grammar too. I had teachers that consistently emphasized "correct French", graded everything I wrote, and then gave me thorough feedback. It seems like this made a big difference. I also peppered my instructors with questions about native slang and speech patterns I noticed in my personal practice/exploration. In response, they did a combination of humoring me with answers and guiding me towards what I needed to know first for those concepts to make sense later. I think this helped a lot because the native 'shortcuts' I learned later made much more sense in context than when I had first heard them. All that being said, if I wrote up my own list of resources or recapped what I did to practice in my free time it would eerily match this. We consumed most of the same media, used the same practice tools, and even used the same references right down to the method of lookup (setting up the search engines), so there's no question in my mind it's possible to find and utilize resources that get you very far in your own time. I wonder if he has considered that someone learning a language in school should take advantage of all of these tools too. > I firmly believe that learning languages in school, especially in the United States, is generally extremely inefficient. If you struggled learning a language in school, don’t let that affect your confidence with learning a new language now. If you practice intelligently, you can learn much more effectively on your own. You get to avoid doing redundant work that isn’t helping you, and you can spend much more time getting 1-on-1 speaking time with teachers who put all their focus lessons on you. It's obvious to me he succeeded due to dedication (and his own account supports this), yet he moves so quickly to condemn the system with only anecdotal evidence. There's no doubt it's not perfect, but couldn't it possibly be that some students simply take French in school to meet a separate requirement and don't really care about learning a language? This was certainly my experience in Undergrad. It was no loss to me as it just freed up more of the teacher's time for my benefit. It also seems like I managed to avoid some of his frustrations in the process based on the experiences I noted above e.g. with finding adequate instructors. Overall, I applaud him for his achievements. I'm just not sure I'm ready to so quickly support this kind of conclusion. Institutions and learning are certainly changing, but it remains to be seen what shape that will take.