I was chatting to my housemate, who discovered last week that she pearl's "Russian style," not "German style." She said it might go back to her learning to knit while her Mom was studying to be a professional Russian translator and sometimes had to take her to class. She had no idea until she saw this on a video. She always thought she was knitting "continental style."
I told her about 20 years ago. I was teaching knitting to a group of SCA ladies in Germany. A very mixed group of everything from the wives (or serving) US military, other Americans and Brits, some native Germans, Scandinavians, and Brits. As almost always happens with more than ten people, some ladies pick up their needles and start knitting after the cast-on lesson.
Several said they had "no idea" what they were doing, but it "felt right." Almost all vague memories of a grandmother or other older relative showing them how to knit when they were four or five, and then they forgot about it (my mother did this with me).
What was startling to me was the number of different ways they automatically picked up and held their needles, saying something like, "Oh, this isn't what you are doing. I must be doing it wrong."
I said, "there are more ways to make two different stitches, the knit and the pearl, than most people think. If it works for you it is all good." Unless you discover you are twisting all your stitches (one lady was doing that) if so, you might want to learn another way so you can follow a pattern. "
This allowed me to talk a bit about the politics of knitting. In the United Kingdom, many knitters had knit continental style until it was labeled "German" in WWI. How left-handed knitters used to be forced to knit with their right hand (a problem especially in American/old English knitting) and the pros and cons of the two most popular styles. At the time, I wasn't very good at teaching "left-handed knitting," but there was almost always someone in the classes who knit continental style who could teach that method which tends to be easier for left-handed people learning to knit for the first time.
I can now do both, but only when I have a strand of yarn in each hand; my fingers refuse to cooperate with left-hand knitting dominant only (continental style), even when I broke my right arm. I do keep practicing, but the brain is a funny thing sometimes.