When you learn a new discipline, what you fail to pay attention to can be just as useful as what you do in fact pay attention to.
Language is very interesting. It occupies a bridge between reflex and reason. Though symbolic in nature, the usage of language itself depends on a sort of unconscious association, a form of muscle memory that one doesn't have to think about to implement. So you have programming, which is a general discipline, but requires the knowledge and skill of a programming language to carry out. The same with various forms of written and oral communications, and even arts: their implementation presupposes competency with language, a symbolic chain which induces in the brain a corresponding chain of events.
Given my habits of thought, it is very difficult to learn programming language quickly. I want to scrutinize every command, and understand the most minuscule mechanics behind them, which in the end disrupts one's fluency with the language when it comes to building greater abstractions on the abstractions.
So if you are pursuing a complex discipline, it is better that the lower level abstractions are hidden from view, and reflexive. I suspect this is part of what makes learning language difficult as an adult. As a child, you don't think logically about the words and grammar structures you are attempting to use, you simply pick them up out of imitation and reflex (and your innate language capabilities take the rest from there), because well, you don't even have that full reasoning capability up and running yet.
Which in the end works in your favor. You don't need to understand the mechanics of the words to use them correctly - though you do use very basic, binary logical processes to determine whether a given word or structure is correct, which is still closer to reflex than it is to reasoning. When you do achieve an acceptable level of fluency, you can use your unused capacity to generate more sophisticated structures of meaning, or go back and scrutinize the mechanics of the words themselves as an etymologist.
It would be lovely if I could simply force my brain to operate temporarily on that lower level, to learn the language reflexively so I can go on to put the language to use on higher level tasks, but the reasoning and inquiry is relentless. So it is repetition and repetition and repetition that saves the day then.
