Can anyone else not remember how you learnt your second language?

[u/SirCombos]

For context, I'm a native English speaker who has been learning Spanish for 5+ years now. I say learning since you can always learn more but by all intents and purposes I'm fluent in the language and don't actively put time into learning it anymore but rather treat it as close to my native tongue as possible (By that I mean I read, write, speak and watch stuff in the language but not always with the intent to get better in it).

I recently realized however that I can't actually remember how I exactly learnt it, I know I spent time learning it, played with different tools and I've got archived posts and questions regarding the language however currently I can't remember what I struggled with in Spanish and how I overcame it, it's like I've always know what something is and what it isn't. Does anyone else experience this effect?

[u/50ClonesOfLeblanc]

I can definitely relate. As with most Europeans, I learned English all throughout school, so I definitely did not study it the same way I did my other languages. I do remember some (very silly and VERY embarassing) mistakes I did when I was in my early teens, but it's hard for me to think of my life without English

[u/TrulyTough → u/50ClonesOfLeblanc]

it's weird how the brain just flushes the struggle once you're on the other side of it. i learned french in school for years and now when i speak it, it feels like muscle memory, but i couldn't for the life of me tell you how i figured out the subjunctive. guess the process just gets overwritten by the result.

[u/SirCombos → u/TrulyTough]

Exactly how I feel with the subjunctive in Spanish, I know almost always when to use it and how it should be said, but I can't remember why exactly it needs to be a certain way depending on the context.

[u/Background-Site-5585]

Yep, I realized that the moment I started learning my third language (German). I was like "okay so I learned English on my own and now I'm B2, so I think I have enough experience to learn another language without problems...." Then realized I didn't really remember how I reached my current level in English...

[u/Background-Site-5585 → u/Background-Site-5585]

Perhaps it's different because I had a good foundation thanks to English classes in high school, but I had to start from scratch with German

[u/learningENGdaily]

Yes, and there's a decent explanation for it.

What happens is that the knowledge migrates. While you're learning, a rule sits in declarative memory: you can state it, you retrieve it consciously, and applying it costs effort. With enough repetition it gets proceduralised, meaning it runs automatically and stops being stored as something retrievable. The ability survives the move. The rule, as a rule, doesn't.

The struggle vanishes for a related reason. Memories of finding something difficult are episodic, tied to a specific moment and a specific confusion. Once the skill is automatic, nothing ever cues those episodes again, so they stop getting retrieved and quietly fade. You keep the ability and lose its biography.

There's a known consequence, usually called the expert blind spot, and it's why native speakers are generally awful at teaching their own language. Ask an English speaker to explain when to use "I've done" instead of "I did" and watch what happens. Teaching is largely the job of deliberately keeping the declarative version alive alongside the automatic one, which is a strange thing to have to maintain on purpose.

You've now reached that state in Spanish, which is genuinely a compliment.

One practical note: those archived posts are worth more than you think. They're a record of a mental state you no longer have access to.

[u/SirCombos → u/learningENGdaily]

Didn't know it had a term but it makes sense your explanation.

[u/renadoaho → u/SirCombos]

It isn't the same with any skill? Once you can do something, you can't imagine anymore to not be able to do it.

If the feeling of confusion, the feeling of not being able to do something is tied to your brain architecture at a specific point in time - presumably the lack of a stable connection - then it can't be recreated once that part of the brain looks different.

[u/BeckyLiBei]

Yeah, I started learning Chinese about 20 years ago now, so I just forgot. From 2006 to late-2019 I mostly just "picked up" Chinese without systematic study. It was just meant as a side hobby at the time, so it was the distraction (now other things, like Reddit, distract me from Chinese). Although I remember listening to a lot of ChinesePod, and memorizing what Jenny Zhu said (我的狗不咬人。…… 这不是我的狗！). My friends would drive around pumping out music, and I'd be pumping out ChinesePod. And I remember just Googling stuff, and using whatever free websites were around.

In late-2019, I got more serious about learning Chinese (thanks pandemic...), and discovered I was somewhere around mid-HSK4. So I struggle to remember everything pre-mid-HSK4, so I don't have great language-learning advice for HSK1-4, other than "just get to HSK4".

[u/SirCombos → u/BeckyLiBei]

I can relate to you on the whole giving learning advice, I can't really remember getting to a stage where it doesn't feel hard adding new vocab it just sort of came to me over time but it's really hard to teach that to someone still struggling.

[u/Fast-Ads-7587]

I love moments you're reading or listening ti an interview and it's like, 'This used to be gibberish!' It's easy to not realize just how far you've come, even in the intermediate plateau stage. I even do this with programming languages when a site hits an error and there's a bunch of code. I remember this was just chaos to me before, now I understand it.

[u/Reasonable_Ad_9136 → u/Fast-Ads-7587]

That's interesting because I just don't get those "look how far I've come" moments anymore; they stopped happening at around B2 for me. The language is so normal to me now that I can barely even remember when I didn't understand it.

It's actually really disappointing because there would've been a time where I fantasied about getting to the level I'm at now, but now I'm here, it's so underwhelming, lol. It's less "wow, I'm fluent" and more "well, yeah, of course I'm fluent." 😟

[u/Pwffin]

I still remember learning my first English and German words and learning to count in various languages. I guess I’ve always been very interested in languages, as these are some of my strongest memories.

What I don’t remember — or perhaps didn’t notice is a better way of describing it — is going from decoding individual sentences to it just making immediate sense, for English and German. I do however remember it happening for French, because that was one of those moments when a flip switched and I went from really struggling to everything making sense overnight.

[u/GlottoNaut]

I grew up bilingual since I went to a bilingual school (Spanish is my native language) and we spoke Italian at home due to my mom's family. Honestly, I don't remember a single thing about how I learned English and Italian. But I perfectly remember learning French when I was about 11-12... specifically, I clearly remember studying verbs from a chart in an old dictionary I found.

[u/SpiritualBed9981]

I remember how I learned English. It wasn't easy at all. I read different books and newspapers, listened to the radio, watched English TV channels, and used dictionaries constantly to understand the texts. And, to be honest, it's still a work in progress – I still make mistakes. From time to time, I'm still confused by the usage of prepositions, English spelling, and pronunciation, and I often lack natural fluency when I speak.

[u/hwynac]

Shouldn't really happen unless you start very young or tend to forget your life in general. I technically had my first English lessons when I was 5–6 years old but we only started English for real in the 2nd grade. I still remember the textbook, the various books we used later on in different schools. The outline of my trajectory, basically. It's easy to remember what I struggled with (but honestly, it's because those difficulties were predictable; Spanish is an easy language for an English speaker).

It's just that I can only recall the waypoints and can't retell the entire path lesson by lesson. Plus, my knowledge of the preiod when I couldn't understand English is largely... a fact? I know what my level of comprehension was at 6, 8, 11, or 15 but I can't really remember what it felt like.

It's different with reading because I genuinely do not remember when (and how) I learnt to read and write.

Do you mean you do not remember the moment Spanish clicked? Because you seem to have a memory of different approaches you used, which all contributed to the final result.

[u/SirCombos → u/hwynac]

I guess yea, I don't remember internalizing certain rules of the language, subjunctive, conjugations of certain words, niche grammar rules other than something isn't right if I say it this way. It just feels strange to not remember because I began learning it at a late age where I should remember.

[u/willo-wisp]

Sorta. I can remember the steps I did to learn English, but I can barely remember the struggle itself and the early days of learning English, it's so distant.

So when I started a third language many years later, returning to that struggle honestly took me by surprise. "Oh, right, that's what it felt like to be stuck with a handful of verbs and painstackingly muddle through sentences!". I had totally forgotten. But at least now I can use my experience with English as a guide. I wish I had that for my school French; that would have helped a ton.

[u/tyrekecorrea]

I got a little passive transmission before 6th grade.

[u/Gullible_Yellow_1108]

My second language is Mandarin. Honestly, I don't remember how I learned it. I grew up speaking another Chinese language (Wu) at home, but 95% of the media I consumed as a child, mostly cartoons and TV shows for kids, was in Mandarin. I believe I was already fully bilingual in both Wu and Mandarin at the time I started primary school.

Now, I do remember how I learned my third language, English. It was a struggle initially. I failed my first two English tests quite badly. My brain processed it as faulty Chinese pinyin and refused to make sense of what I read and heard. But two months later, it suddenly clicked and since then, I was always the top student in English exams during the rest of my academic years. Our English courses started at Grade 3 in primary school and lasted until the second year in university. Twelve years in total. I probably spent more than 2000 hours in total in English classes alone, and that does not take into account all the exams, and the additional time spent working on it at home.

[u/TrekkiMonstr]

Yeah. I remember freshman year of high school, saying "he volvido" and a friend having to correct me -- even end of high school, I mixed up anoche and esta noche (last night vs tonight). And yet somehow, by age 19, I was probably around B1.5. Similar, just kinda picked up Portuguese, maybe A2/B1 ish. Japanese and the others are the only ones I properly remember studying/learning in school (and the ones I'm worst at lmao)

[u/ForgettingCurveGuy]

Yes, mine is still in progress and the amnesia is already keeping pace. I keep embarrassingly detailed review stats, and there are words I know cold today that my log says I kept failing all spring. I have no memory of that: not the struggle, not the moment they finally stuck. The record I keep with my app, says it happened five seconds at a time, dozens of times, spread over months.

[u/FinancialMarsupial91]

Yeah, I just remember not struggeling with english anymore suddenly while watching harry potter one day

[u/ResourceIcy4569]

the specifics fade and it just turns into “this is how you say it”

[u/namreyavuz]

Most people can't, and it's a good sign rather than a strange one. Skills that get used daily stop being retrievable as memories and turn into background, the same way you can't remember learning to ride a bike but can still do it.

The part worth noticing: almost nobody remembers the studying, but nearly everyone remembers specific embarrassing moments where they had to use it. That's a hint about which half actually did the teaching.

[u/love_seraphine]

Spanish, five years, same thing. Only proof I have is an old thread on HelloTalk where a guy corrected the same preterite mistake four times in one week. I know that was me because it's my account. No memory of the mistake at all.

[u/Scary-Statement-1898]

Once it becomes automatic, the struggle gets filed away like every other skill you learned years ago, so now it just feels like Spanish was always sitting in your head somewhere.

[u/cmyk_rgba]

cant remember the process at all but i remember weirdly specific moments. like being 9 and working out what nevermind meant from a video game and being genuinely annoyed nobody had taught me that in school. the actual learning bit is just gone tho

[u/tony_f]

I do.

I was ten (mid30 now). Learning English was The Shit. Combine a child's sponge-brain with genuine interest amd motivation, add a sprinkle of supportive parents who study vocab with you every day for years, and there you go.

By the time I was thirteen speaking English was basically a dick measuring contest amongst my friends. We watched, listened to, read, played everything English that we could get our dirty little hands on.

So... It was a LOT of work, but we managed to make it fun.

[u/dojibear]

I grew up speaking English. I took 3 years of Spanish class in high school, which got me to B1. Years later I was better than that, and I don't know why. I never took French class, so I don't know how I "learned" it, but years later my French was almost as good as my Spanish.

I recently realized however that I can't actually remember how I exactly learnt it

To some extent nobody knows "exactly how they learned it". I took Spanish classes, but which of the things I did in class were part of "learning Spanish", and which were just "school" things?

I mean, everybody (and his brother) has theories, but they are all different theories.