My English didn’t break. My Spanish did.

English is my second language, but it doesn’t feel like one, and I think that distinction matters more than I thought.

I learned English very early, before I had any real sense of what learning a language even meant. From around the age of four or five, English was just part of my environment. I watched cartoons in English, listened to English music, and later grew up surrounded by American TV shows, films, and pop culture.

My older sister played a role too. She spoke English to me, taught me the alphabet, and explained words when I asked. None of it was systematic or planned, it was just exposure, the way it often is in families.

Because of that, English never felt like a big deal. It felt closer to the way my first language felt, something I absorbed.

When I started learning English in school, I was already basically fluent. So I didn't really learn how to read, write, or speak in English at school, it was more like an explanation of things I already knew instinctively.

My Spanish followed a completely different path

I got exposed to Spanish a bit later. I picked it up through media, mostly, and through a wide mix of it. Mexican telenovelas, Spanish TV shows, Argentine films – different accents, different rhythms, different vocabularies, all blending together.

There was no single standard version of Spanish forming in my head, and there was no structure guiding what came first or what came next.

So from early on, my relationship with Spanish was uneven. I understood a lot, often much more than you'd expect, especially given how little I actually spoke. I could follow conversations and storylines without much trouble.

Sometimes I spoke Spanish with friends who also knew it. I wasn’t fluent, but I wasn’t completely blocked either. It felt like I was somewhere in the middle of becoming fluent, even if I couldn’t have explained exactly where.

Then I stopped using it.

The people I spoke Spanish with weren’t part of my daily life anymore, and there was no practical reason to keep speaking it. I still watched things in Spanish and still understood them, but speaking slowly fell out of my routine.

What’s strange is that understanding never really suffered. Even now, I can understand Spanish with very little effort. I can follow films, conversations, and podcasts without feeling lost. But when it’s time to speak, the difference is obvious.

I’ve had moments where I couldn’t recall a very basic word like "wind," while at the same time understanding much more complex language without any trouble. That contradiction has stayed with me, because it doesn’t fit the way language learning is usually described.

At some point, I tried to deal with Spanish the way we're told we're supposed to. I turned to structured learning and formal explanations, hoping that if I just filled in the gaps properly, everything would line up again.

It never really did.

The frustration was real

The systems I tried didn’t know what to do with me. I knew too much in some areas and not enough in others. I would use certain constructions correctly just by instinct, without being able to explain them, while getting stuck on things that were supposedly basic.

Looking back on it now, I don’t think Spanish failed because I didn’t try hard enough or because I lacked discipline. I think it broke because the way I was learning it changed halfway through.

I started learning Spanish in a way that was much closer to how children learn languages: through immersion, repetition, and intuition. But before that process had time to stabilize into confident speech, my environment changed.

Without daily use, I shifted into adult learning modes:

• thinking about rules
• monitoring myself
• trying to fix things consciously.

English didn’t go through that transition. It formed early, deeply, and continuously. Spanish didn’t get the chance to do the same.

That difference explains more about my language experience than motivation, talent, or effort ever could. It’s also the reason I’m interested in Broken Fluency at all — not as a personal failure, but as a predictable outcome of how learning conditions change as we grow older.