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unless you use a language regularly, you tend to forget it. I'm forgetting a lot of my French -- and I used to be fluent (well, lived in Belgium for a while so had to..). That's mostly because I'm concentrating on Polish (and that IS a difficult language)

As you pointed out about Spanish, when you are in an environment where you have to speak a language, you can generally pick it up.

There is a limited choice of pronouns to choose from, tense is not dealt with properly, and the rising or falling tone of your voice is more important to the meaning of words than syllables are. It is a ridiculous language. -- having never even attempted that language, I can't comment.

with regards to pronouns, I realized that English is different from satem Indo-European languages in that it insists on having personal pronouns -- I found that Slavic, Indic languages do not have that insistence (you don't have to say "you, he, it etc" even though those pronouns exist as the form of the verb defines it clearly). They don't have prepositions either, hence their difficulty to know when to put "it"

Finally, tenses -- in American English we've simplified it, more or less removing past perfect. For Poles, in modern, post-war Polish, the concept of perfect tenses don't exist as they have a separate set of verbs that denotes perfective actions