Language Barriers

When I started secondary school, I told my pal Minto that I was looking forward to learning how to speak French. And I was. It seemed such a cool idea, learning a new language, being able to speak to French people. It was almost a super power. Minto stared at me as if I was nuts. He was repeating first year. He knew that the odds that I was about to be disillusioned were about three to one.
Our S1 French teacher was severe. She had little time for levity and shot from the hip when any misbehaviour put its head out the saloon door. I got on well in her class because I was fairly smart and didn't misbehave. Minto, who was no clown, hated her. He had a model Volkswagen Beetle which he had painted with an iron cross and the French teacher's room number (she was also a German teacher) claiming it was her car. Actually, she had an Austin 1100. I noticed things like that.
In S2, we got a great guy for French. He was funny and related to us on a personal level. Unfortunately, having coped well with French in first year, I was put in a German class in second year, instead of technical. Our German teacher was 90 or so. Due to staff shortages, she had made more comebacks from retirement than Status Quo. I used to imagine her opening a cupboard in her house and being buried beneath a deluge of carriage clocks and engraved trays.
She hated modern music, fashion and comprehensive schools. I thought she hated me but she wrote in my report that I was a delightful pupil.
I dropped German after S2. That summer summer, I made up a song, to the tune of the Wild Rover, about how I would "nae never, nae mair" get this teacher. Wrong. I had her for O grade French, two years of it.
I met both these frosty teachers after I left and they were exceptionally nice. What made them the way they were in class? Was it an assumption that people, particularly boys, disliked their subjects intensely and could thus be given no truck? What's French for "vicious circle"?
I took French up to Higher and learned more about grammar in those classes than I ever did in English. I wouldn't know what it means to conjugate a verb if it wasn't for modern language lessons in school. The story goes, though, that in the seventies pupils were too busy giving verbs their conjugal rights to learn to speak to people. This should be deplored, but to the adolescent Scottish boy, trying to re-master English with a broken voice, it suited fine.
Whenever I go abroad, I try to learn a few words of the host country's language. I get laughed at by my family, mostly because of a single occasion when a street vendor said, "Say in English, then I understand". This doesn't stop me. When I went to China, I made sure I had the words for "hello" and "thank you" at the ready. I became more ambitious too, though on reflection this might not have been wise. Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language - "ma" can mean five different things depending on whether you tone rises, falls, stays the same and so on. Still, the desire to obtain a new superpower was as strong as it was forty years ago. I bought apps. I bought books. When I came home, I discovered an online translator. Imagine my delight when I said, in Mandarin, "what is your name?" and it knew what I meant. Imagine my horror when it translated "wife" as "77" and "where do you come from?" as "where do you empty?" What on earth had I been saying to people during my business trip?
I persist. The best advice I ever had about speaking French was not to worry about sounding like a caricature of a French person. I note that my book on Mandarin tells me that I shouldn't be embarrassed about making funny faces when learning tones.
Sadly, any advice on not being embarrassed or feeling awkward and even any suggestion that learning a language could be fun was missing from 90% of my own modern languages education. Please tell me it's not a case of "Plus ça change..."