Why do we never lose certain skills we have learned, even if we haven’t practiced them for a long time. like for example riding a bicycle, and we lose some, like a new language we learned 10 years ago but can’t remember anything about it now?
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Speaking a language is not comparable to riding a bike. You can finish learning to ride a bike, but you can never finish learning a language.
These are two separate types of activities. Using English words to define them is tricky because those words have semantic issues usually, so I am going to make up some words here to highlight this:
Riding a bike is a type of splork activity. Splorks can be completely learned, as in there is an upper limit to what can be done. It’s mechanical, riding a bike is something that you just need to learn how to do. Other splorks include eating, taking a shower, using a door.
Then you have foobles, which can never be fully learned, only improved. Generally speaking (especially for language learning) it’s because of the utter complexity and infinite potential of the action. Keeping language as the example, day one to the last you are continually practicing even your first language – but your native language has the advantage that your brain was shaped and built around it. Languages learned after puberty have to map onto your brains structure, and are essentially pigeon holed into comparisons with the first language(s).
Because riding a bike is so fucking easy that once you’ve figured out the way you need to balance on it anyone can do it.
Learning a new language as an adult is fucking hard.
That’s why.
One is a simple motor skill, and the other is a complex web of interweaving rules and vocabulary that relies on millions of additional brain cells.
Possibly the proprioceptors in your joints ‘remember’ most movements for you. All you need to do is reinforce the activities by doing them enough times for you to do the action or activity that it might be done without deliberation … sometimes even in a hypnagogic state.
As a former neurobiologist to keep it simple: those information is stored within different parts of the brain.
Movement like riding a bike is stored in the very “basic” cerebellum, language you learn until you a 4-6 within a primary language area (where it is well protected)… and every language you learn after that time is stored within a general second language area, where it is doomed to be forgotten, when it is not used regularly.
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