I don't know whether you're equivocating on the distinction between mastering a language in school -- getting A's in the class -- or mastering a language in the abstract sense, such as having as strong a command of it as, say Bill Buckley, Bill Safire, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou.
As a matter of fact, yes. Hell, yes. All four of my kids did. I did. Momma did. Dad did. My siblings did. Most of their and my classmates did. It's probably worth noting that at schools like NYMA where/when Trump went, almost everybody earns As of some sort, graded on the seven-point scale (all As fall between 93 and 100). (Don't ask me why, but for some reason, my "contrarian" son's school used a "wonky" 11-point scale that had pluses for all grades but A, which had either A or A-. My daughter's school was even more bizarre, but somehow colleges figure out what the number grades actually mean in "the real world." )
By one's fourth semester studying the language, the
entire class was conducted in the language -- French, Spanish, Latin, etc. Language classes were like English class, except it was French or Spanish or whatever. Students are assigned literature to read, they read it, they discuss it in class, they write papers about it. The same kinds of conversations happen in, say, French class as any other class.
- French: Maybe the current week's literature is Les Misérables. In discussing it, someone might also connect something from the story to something they saw or did in Paris, for instance, recounting being at a patisserie on St. Denis, or describing a section of another city they visited that reminded them of a setting Hugo described. That might lead into a sidebar discussion about the political, social, economic, etc. life at the time and how it's similar to or different from the present day. That whole conversation happens in French.
Every word we uttered in English was a half point reduction in our grade on the next writing assignment and a one point reduction in the classroom participation grade. Even during a fire drill, the teacher's instruction to leave our belongings behind and exit into the hallway were in French.
A thing to understand about learning a language in a scholastic setting is that the only ways one is taught to speak and write are the grammatically and illocutionarianally correct ways to do so; consequently, upon traveling to a place where the language is spoken, one has to learn the local colloquialisms, idioms, and so on, but lacking those elements is a matter of a degree of fluency/mastery, not a matter of how close to being fluent one is. It's no different with English or anything else that's measured not discretely, but on a continuum. For instance:
- Languages: One need not have a high degree of fluency to be rightly said to have mastered, be fluent in a language.
- Beginner --> Intermediate speaker --> Fluent speaker --> Speaker with a high degree of fluency --> Beautiful/eloquent speaker of the language
- Sports: One need not be a hall of famer to rightly claim having mastered the sport.
- Intramural --> Junior varsity --> Varsity --> Collegiate athlete --> Olympian --> Bronze medal winner --> Silver medal winner --> Gold medal winners, or maybe
- Intramural --> Junior varsity --> Varsity --> Collegiate athlete --> Pro --> Hall of Famer
So, yes, plenty of folks/kids master a foreign language in school. I'm sure plenty don't too. But again, Trump went to an elite boarding school where
the bar is just higher. It was then just as it is now, and at the least, graduating from NYMA, he should have retained enough to say that he has at least partial mastery of a, any one, foreign language.
