Yeah, that would certainly help, obviously more so for somewhat related languages like Spanish than for the likes of Arabic or Urdu.

Well, I did say for the non-western languages. It's not from personal experience that I'm speaking, though, merely by what I was told recently by a number of friends who spent a year in Japan and were less than impressed by the fluency of the American and British students there. Which is merely anecdotal evidence, admittedly. And indeed, my even more limited personal experience - back when Angie was taking a class in Japanese - does suggest that the language education in the US is similar enough to ours, except for simply being less intensive because there are more other subjects besides.

Yes, I rather doubt either of us is going to convince the other there. In my view, exposure to all kinds of subjects is for HS; university is for dedicated study of a certain subject, and there's no point in wasting time on unrelated subjects that you won't need for anything (certainly it doesn't follow that a history study should have nothing but history classes, but the other subjects should be somewhat related at least - anthropology works for me, geology not so much). The result is that our universities need less time to get to the same results - three years of undergrad standard instead of four in the US - and I don't really see any downsides to how we do it. But as I said, I doubt I will convince you of that.

What is it with cultural historians and Marxism? In most every other field, precious few people would dare to call themselves Marxists for fear of getting laughed out of the university.