TSS42 wrote:The other day I was horrified to realise that I had forgotten the German of "manual transmission" and "to approve". I really don't want to go back to Anki and I don't want to have pointless conversations with strangers.
I don't have advice to give, I just wanted to say that this kind of thing happening is normal and possibly even unavoidable, even for native speakers.
My husband is a native Italian speaker. He has an extremely high level of Italian (he was a voracious reader of classics for most of his life and went through a long phase of believing that having the highest level of his native language possible was better than studying other languages before eventually changing his mind and believing the opposite). He learned English seriously as an adult and moved to the US in his late 20s, where he's been living for 10+ years. I'd say 95% of his life has been English for the past decade. Since moving here, the only time he uses Italian is to talk to his family/friends still in Italy who don't speak English, but that's no more than 1-4 times/week on average.
He has recently started talking about how horrified he was to realize that he's starting to have problems recalling some Italian words while speaking and at times when speaking Italian he automatically thinks of certain words in English first and has to really make an effort to avoid using them and reach for an Italian equivalent. He tends to always talk about the same kinds of topics with his parents or with his cousin or best friend so he never really has occasion to use certain words. When he wants to say something he hasn't said in a long time he might struggle to retrieve it. However, once he hears it again, obviously he knows what it means and then he could use it in the future, if he had need for it again.
So if the same thing is happening to even a native speaker then probably it's a natural process. There are definitely things you can do to reduce how much it happens (like the advice others gave) but at some level it's probably not avoidable or worth stressing about. In your case, even if you were doing LE all along, the terms "manual transmission" or "approve" might still not have come up unless you had made a huge effort to talk about a vast array of topics.