Alvaro, I enjoyed reading what you wrote. In the beginning when you thought that speaking, I assume, English was all you needed, maybe it was what you needed at that time. Maybe it’s that speaking and having conversations, even if you were stumbling through the conversations, got the ball rolling so that you saw the need to delve further into phrasal verbs, vocabulary and everything you mentioned. I saw a few errors in your writing, but you were understandable for sure. For me in my journey to learn Spanish I find that I work at it, then I stop, then after some time I pick it up again. Recently I went to New York City and I found myself being able to communicate in Spanish with some people in restaurants. Also, I was able to communicate in a situation where there were three people from France. One could speak English a little, but one was bilingual in French and Spanish. I was able to communicate in Spanish to that French person. That experience made me realize I wanted to continue classes with my Spanish teacher. Alvaro, look through what you wrote again. There were a few places where you should have used a period instead of a comma. You had completed a sentence and needed to put a period there before starting the new sentence.

At the beginning I believed that just talking it would be enough to improve my speaking. After several months, I had to face the truth, I've improved my fluency, but not too much my speaking as a whole. I realized that I actually had to brush up my vocabulary (words/phrasal verbs/idioms), study grammar, write, and of course speak. Speaking has 4 main areas: fluency, grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. Nowadays, for each speaking session there's a topic and there are some vocabulary, phrasal verbs and idioms related to that topic that I must learn using flashcards and force me to use them while talking. Besides that, it helps a lot to have goals and develop your strategy.

Maybe collective memory is the grief you feel in total as it collects in your psyche.