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Is learning new languages actually worth it for adults?
I have met people who have lived in a country for years, are intelligent and have studied hard. Yet they are far from a native speaker. Those who haven't spoken their new language for years seem to lose it. Is picking up French/German/Spanish worth it? It seems like an enormous investment to develop worse language skills than the average native 12-year-old. Even when it comes to enjoying the culture in the native language, I am not even sure it would be the case. A person who learned latin and read Caesar's memoirs in the original latin would probably get less out of it due to their lacking latin than reading a translated copy.
I studied a language for 6 years in school. Along with everyone I know who hasn't studied their extra language extensively post school I can barely write a paragraph in it. Was it a giant waste of time to have Spanish or French an hour a week for 6 years when the results are lacking?
If learning a language meant learning it to the point of fluency or near native ability, I could see the point. However, most learners seem to spend countless hours learning without being able to have a conversation that doesn't require effort from both parties.
I think it's almost never worth it to learn a language as an adult just for fun or in order to consume media. That said, I have met several people who learned a foreign language as adults to a native-like proficiency (by my own judgement as a native speaker of that language). All of them use that language extensively in the course of their work; two of them are professors teaching either the language or a subject that requires reading difficult primary sources in the language at well-known universities. This is a non-indo-european language that's supposed to be hard for English speakers to learn, so I imagine it's even easier to find examples of people who have achieved this level of skill in the examples you named (French/German/Spanish).
My prior is that it's not really possible to learn a language well in the one-hour/day format in which foreign languages are taught in most secondary schools and language-specific supplementary schooling programs, no matter how many years you spend on it.
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