Yeah, I kind of used "speak" in the sense of "know", I guess, but of course one can know a language in a way without being able to speak it well. Maybe it was badly phrased, then.

Sounds like, yes - would've been a good bit better if you'd had to continue Spanish until finishing HS, one imagines. Though as ent mentions, I imagine learning Spanish is becoming far easier now everywhere in the US, not just in the Southwest anymore.

Yeah, I've noted before that American top universities are often quite impressive in their language education and requirements, unlike the high schools. A comparable history program here would also expect reading fluency in German and French without devoting any classes to it (but then reading fluency in German is very easy to obtain if one's native language is Dutch), but for programs that require more exotic languages (by our standards), American universities can easily stand the comparison. Although when it comes to majors and minors in, say, Japanese or other non-western languages, I've been given to understand American (and British) universities focus too much on academic knowledge and too little on working knowledge and speaking proficiency in those languages. Or so people say. Of course, the nature of your universities - the major/minor system, the general requirements - make it logical that an American student of for instance Japanese wouldn't be able to spend as much time learning Japanese as a Belgian one would.

You might say that, yes.