Put my foot in my mouth today

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It does not exactly work with me. Been trying that since I was a child. I am supposed to be able to speak Welsh as well. No chance. It is like if I learn new words. I either forget them again (I will remember them for a few hours and then that's it. In school I would remember things for that lesson (If they were things I could not get my memory to latch onto as tney were outside of my special interest subjects) but the next lesson on another day... Well I puzzled teachers. A maths teacher said it was as if he had not taught me at all on the last lesson. He would have to go back and start from scratch again!

You see, that my mind works best in pictures be they still pictures or in film form. I can design things in my mind and build them.
The strange thing is I was not slow to learn to speak. If anything I was very early in my first three words... But they were copying and very clear and exactly pronounced. I remember them. I was said to be 6 to 8 months old. I did not know what the words meant. I did not learn to speak properly until I guess I was normal age because when I said those three words, I remember my Dad going buzzurk and raising his voice in excitement. I thought I had done something wrong and so I said nothing at all after that until about normal age for speaking? But though I had no issues with speech, I would not speak much at all in school until about seven years old when I had to as if I did not speak I was going to be taken to a special school. From then on I made an effort to speak if a teacher spoke to me. But I was still very shy and reserved.

But somehow... Well. When I was about 12 years old an English teacher complained that I wasn't reading enough books as I had a poor vocabluary, but like my Mum said. I was reading for several hours a day at the time. My Mum had a job to get me to sleep because I was reading. It did not improve my vocabluary. It just meant I lacked sleep, as I would ignore words I did not know, because I knew that I could not retain them so easily if I did learn what they mean.

Some words did eventually stick. When I was 13 in Science we did sex education. I did not have a clue and I was gullablw. One kid said he wated to ask Miss for a practical but he asked me to ask her. I dis and got told off. I did not know what the word "Practical" actually meant. I thought it was a word to do with Science. Complicated words and me did not do well together.
The really great thing is that people speaking other languages who are trying to learn to speak English find me very easy to talk to because of the simple words I use.

One thing I do notice. If I do learn a new word, another less used word I will forget. I tend to loose more words in this way...

My Mother. You may have heard me say that if I am on the spectrum then she is and her Mum was as well. (Her Mum was a nurvous character. Always giving but she was kind of always anxious inside? She used to do later in life what I now know is "Verbal stimming").
My Mum though... Unlike me her special interest is English and she can also pick up other Western languages if she needs to. Language is really her thing. She could read and write when she was two and a half and by the age of six, she had read about half the books in the local library which one of her aunts ran. She really was exceptionally advanced but also her Mother had endless patience to teach her.
My Mother thinks in word form. She does Maths in word form. I do sums in picture form. I have to picture formations of dots so I can "Grasp" the patterns of dots to do maths. It is why I could never show my workings out to my Maths teachers!