Whatever we learn, or at least some of it, goes with us; it never gets completely lost. I've realized that when visiting Moscow, a few years ago.
In the higher grade of elementary school, in communist Romania, we started to learn russian as a second language. It was difficult for us, native speakers of a romance language (romanian) because of russian's Cyrillic script as opposed to the Latin script. Besides, our teacher was young and inexperienced, so the teaching was not very productive.
Years later, I managed to remember only a few random russian words, but I did remember well the alphabet. The knowledge of the alphabet was of tremendous help to me in two places in Moscow: the stunning Metro (reading the names of the stations), and the famous Novodevichi cemetery where all the 'Who's Who' of Russia were buried (reading the names on the headstones).
(The signs everywhere in the city were in russian only, which made it very difficult for a tourist without a guide or group to find his way around).
After visiting the tombstones of politicians (Khruschev, Yeltsin), of writers (Chechkov, Gogol), composers (Shostakovitch), ballet dancer (Galina Ulanova), wives of Stalin and Gurbachev (Nadhezda, Raisa), violonist (David Oistreich), opera singer (Shaleapin) and others, I approached a small group of tourists in a corner I was about to explore on my own.
Yeltsin's headstone; it catches the eye with its unusual shape and colors.
It turned out, the group I approached was israeli . While listening to the guide's explanations (in hebrew), I got the strange feeling he didn't know any russian. I was probably right, as he pointed to a headstone and said ;'here liesTupolev' (aircraft designer, the designer of the famous Tupolev russian military bombers). 'No, I found myself intervening, Tupolev lies next; have a look at the name on the stone'. There was silence in the air, and I felt badly about it.
Obviously, the guide could not read russian. I could....due to those rather boring russian lessons in elementary school. lol.