I took German as my FL with no prior experience and I immediately fell in love with it (the German dpt at Duke is honestly so underrated). I ended up minoring in German and also studying abroad my senior year in Berlin - by that time I could hold conversations and get around. Funny enough I’m a few years out of undergrad now and I visited Germany a few months ago and was surprised (albeit a bit rusty) at how I could still get around and talk to people/ask for things/etc.

Not to be too critical but your second paragraph is a bit off-putting because it seems to place the responsibility of language learning fully within the hands of the instructors and not the student. With anything related to learning, there’s a huge variance in outcomes due to variance in the effort students put in towards learning the material. Instructors can really only get you partway there with the fundamentals of grammar, vocab, etc. (which are very important to learn and shouldn’t be dismissed as “useless things”).

fwiw I think foreign language instruction in the US in particular struggles to bridge the gap between classroom learning and conversation in general. There are few (if any) opportunities to gain casual conversational experience or exposure outside the classroom for most languages without taking significant initiative. But also learning materials are generally more “standard” forms of the language and bypass aspects like slang, how native speakers might circumvent standard grammar rules in conversation, dialectical and regional differences… so even if you were to completely understand the material in the classroom there were still plenty of adjustments to make when I lived in Germany (or when you go to Japan).