FWIW, I felt the same way. Studied French for years, through middle school, high school and college, and never gained any real degree of fluency. Then I moved to Japan and took language classes for 4 hours a day for a year. It worked.

There were people who still raced around me -- I'm not gifted at languages, by any means -- but for the first time in my life I'm actually modestly capable in a second language. I continue to study now, and it's still accumulating, however slowly.

After this experience, I believe that most people can learn a second language, but they don't because the barriers to entry are insanely high. If you really want to learn a language to a conversational level of fluency, you either have to be truly gifted (5% of people) have to want it so much that you'll immerse yourself in it 24/7 (the rest of us).

> I did 4 years of french, 2 years of spanish, 4 semesters of Arabic, 2 semesters of german, 1 Berlitz tutor session for 3 months in Russian and 3 months of tutoring in Farsi

It took me about 3 months of daily immersion in Japanese life (plus the 4 hours of daily school, of course) just to get to a point where my ears could hear words reliably. If you translate this to coursework...it's got to be 1+ years of college-level study.

I'm in a similar boat. I absorbed German really easily, but when I moved on to picking up another language, my brain constantly switched between the two, even during an intensive study course that was basically several hours a day exclusively in one. I tried beating my brain into the right shape, but no amount of effort made me anything but embarrassing in anything other than my native tongue.