>They're not thinking about grammatical rules, in fact many people that learn many languages almost never learn grammar very well at all, what they learn is how to ask for a bathroom, where an address is, what's such and such called, or how do you say..., or how are you today?, how much is this?, that is okay, and various responses, ect., things that allow them to do things with people who speak different languages.
Learning phrases is not learning a language. Again, you're doing nothing to explain the very real phenomenon of individual differences in second language acquisition.