I think that's more to do with how we teach it and expect it be learned than the subject itself. I took 4 years of German in school and have almost nothing to show for it. I went to Germany for the first time recently and was only able to barely perform basic transactions, granted it's been 6 years since I've used it. But I started self-studying Japanese (and later Chinese) on the order of 30 minutes a day and was able to have conversations that lasted hours with multiple people at a bar in Taiwan after studying for just 2.5 years.

I went to "one of the best public schools" in America and have heard that college level language education isn't much better, so I think this is universally true of language learning classes in America.

The truth is that learning a foreign language is very "hard", where "hard" means requiring daily effort and willpower while often feeling confused and looking stupid while seeing little or no results for extended periods of time.

Generalizing this, I also thought I didn't like math until I went to university because all my math classes had been extremely boring and uninspiring. On a personal level, public school past the age of 14 was a massive waste of time and money.