I can attest to that. When I was 9, we moved to another country and I had to learn Spanish from scratch. A year or so later, I still couldn't speak without an a

I can attest to that. When I was 9, we moved to another country and I had to learn Spanish from scratch. A year or so later, I still couldn't speak without an accent and still had a small vocabulary, but I vastly outperformed most of my classmates in orthography and grammar.