One of the reasons I'm so fixated on foreign language skills is that, despite always valuing the import of speaking another language, it wasn't until well into adulthood where I finally began to be able to do so. And there's really no excuse for that.
Yes, my having begun my foreign language education with Latin may not have been a good first step in acquiring fluency in any modern, spoken languages. But in my high school sophomore year I switched to Spanish. And in a bureaucratic twist I still can't figure out how I was able to achieve, I got to take Spanish in a private class. I met one-on-one with the teacher, every day during lunch, and we cranked through two years' worth of curriculum in one. It was an amazing opportunity, and it helped me grasp grammatical concepts that I still build upon today in any language that I speak.
But it was Spanish I and II, and in my school the subjunctive wasn't taught until Spanish III. And Spanish uses the subjunctive A LOT. Many things that can be expressed in the indicative in English would come out wrong if spoken in the indicative in Spanish. So my teacher said, regularly, "Don't try to speak. You don't know the grammar and you'll get it wrong."
So I never, ever spoke Spanish. In fact, I was afraid to – I would be wrong! Instead I patiently waited until that far off day when a teacher would tap me on the shoulder and say, "OK, now you're ready to speak Spanish."
When the truth of the matter is that you can speak a foreign language from the first word you learn. Speaking is about the exchange of ideas. It doesn't take an expansive vocabulary and sophisticated grammar to do it – it just takes the attempt. Which is not to say you should pass off unintelligible gibberish as a foreign language, but you need to start making attempts at the connection so that experience will be able to plug the gaps and teach you the rest of the language. Without speaking, learning a language is like learning algebra – you might get the formulas down, but you'll never be able to actually speak it.
It's tragic, really, all that time wasted. All that time where we could have had oral drill after oral drill. And I would have finished my sophomore year with the confidence to have a conversation. Instead, I finished the next year, the year after, and a year of college Spanish and never had a conversation in Spanish with anyone. It's so stupid – it's the language I've actually studied more than any other yet it's the one I speak the least.
But my adult experience with French, and my recent forays into German, give me hope that I could someday, with a little effort, learn to actually speak Spanish. It's a very regular language, grammatically, and I still remember most of the concepts, if not the exact structures. With a textbook and a conversational opportunity, I think I could learn it. Someday I hope I do.