system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: When people lose their memory to the point that they don't even remember their own name, how can they seemingly still speak their language fluently?
gpt
There are two different categories of memory, declarative (or implicit) and procedural (or explicit). These break down further; declarative memory can be broken down into semantic memory (facts, like your name) and episodic memory (things like a sequence of events). Usually when memory loss occurs, it happens to only one kind of memory (most frequently episodic), and does not typically affect all memory.

So, when you forget your name (declarative semantic memory), you don't necessarily forget your language (procedural skill memory). Although you might have trouble remembering an exact definition of a word, you could still string together a sentence that made coherent sense.