I am a native Spanish speaker, and it was weird how I started understanding English: once I was standing with my back to the tv and suddenly, without paying attention, I could understand what they were saying. All those years of study had paid up! Then, little by little, I started to understand what Schopenhauer meant when he said that knowing a language means knowing its psychology. It is knowing the categories with which it thinks. I guess that would be a nice sign: knowing why they make up some expressions, why they say some things the way they do.
There there is that point where... you just know... but that's, of course, beyond words.
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