I've had the opposite experience - once I learn something like a language, I never forget it. But people around me do, and I think it's as strange as forgettin

I've had the opposite experience - once I learn something like a language, I never forget it. But people around me do, and I think it's as strange as forgetting your own name or who your family was. On the other hand, I'm mystified by how efficient "normal" people's memory for places and directions is. It takes me hours of studying a map and many repetitions of practice to learn a new route, and if I don't go a certain way (even to get to my own house or in the neighborhood I grew up in) it fades just like people describe losing language. So it's like those two capabilities are exchanged in my brain. My best friend and I took 2-3 years of German in high school, and we'd talk to each other using the German we learned. We also knew two German exchange students. In academic meets (test taking competitions) I placed in German II and my friend placed in German I. Unfortunately we had no one to speak German with after graduating high school. In all the time after high school, I only ran into one native German speaker, at some conference. I said something like, "Ja, Ich spreche ein bischen Deutsch..." and based on my accent he said, "Oh? You've been to Germany then." I shook my head, sadly no I've never been. Years later I saw my friend again and spoke some German to him, and he didn't understand me. So I used German phrases I remembered had been his "favorites", and I was shocked he even forgot those too. It felt like I was one of the Lost Boys in the movie "Hook" trying to get Peter Banning to remember he was Pan.