Oh, that's a good point! I mean, I imagine selenak has visited France way more than I have and has therefore had rather more in the way of practice, but my French is quite serviceable more than twenty-five years later without really much in the way of practice at all, and although I was a good student, I don't imagine I was any better a French student than selenak was a Latin student.

Now, this was also in the days when I actually had a good memory and retained everything. (I obviously don't have a good memory at all now, but I really did back in high school! If only I had had salon in high school :P ) I was going to say that I took in theory a similar level of Italian as an adult from the local community college and retain almost none of it, which is absolutely partially due to retaining things much better in high school, but also those classes were twice a week instead of every day, and then I only took two semesters' worth, in which we did about as much material grammar-wise as we would have done in two years of high school, but obviously I only got a year's worth of practice (and I wasn't motivated enough to practice outside of classwork).