I am a literature person. A good deal of the reading I do for pleasure is in Spanish or French (and sometimes Italian and Catalan). Language competency is important to me. But it hasn’t been important to my kids at all (or my wife). My daughter had a lot of interest in it initially. She studied both Latin and French; in 10th grade, she was reading Baudelaire, Camus, and a French translation of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being on her own. But her interest in French was brutally snuffed out by year after year of deadly dull, deadly slow intermediate language study.
I lucked out – I never had to take Level III of anything.
@wis75 I have to say I agree with @skieurope. The French definitely won the Literature Superbowl in the 18th and 19th Centuries, and they still have their moments, but Spanish-language literature from the past century has lapped the European field a couple of times. Spanish literature from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance ain’t too shabby, either. I agree that there’s lots to love in German and Russian literature, too, and Scandinavian literature as well. I also recently fell in love with the medieval sagas of Iceland – I really wish I could read Old Islandic!