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

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?

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

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.

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...

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

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.

Yeah, I started learning Chinese about 20 years ago now. 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".

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.

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.

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.

Shouldn't really happen unless you start really 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, 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.

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.

I got a little passive transmission before 6th grade.