I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that’d be rather time consuming.
Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can’t ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.
edit: the high number of replies mentioning “swimming” made me realize that I had that filed as a basic skill pretty much everybody has - probably due to swimming lessons being a mandatory part of school education here.
I took Spanish for three years here in the States. Most of the Spanish I know now I learned after high school. This seems to be a pretty common problem in nations with English as the official language…
Damned be my pervasive mother tongue! I want immersion! Immersion I say!!
Common for everybody learning a language in an educational institution without RL practice. Immersion, of course, is the best way to learn a language, - gives good results even if you didn’t know it at all before being, eh, immersed.