Now that my vision is finally clear about this topic of grammar acquisition, I can see that, when the kids translate a reading text and, in doing so, get the image of a movie in their heads, they are learning how the bricks fit together without even knowing anything about the individual bricks except what they mean – they understand “him” when they hear it, but they don’t know, or need to know, that it is a personal object pronoun. So much more efficient!
They thus arrange the grammar bricks using their deeper mind. This works because the deeper mind is so much more efficient at this sort of thing – learning grammar – than the conscious mind is. It is how we actually learn languages! Learning grammar in this way is natural.
When we learn grammar in this way, the bricks – the parts of speech and all that – actually become a house in califragalistic fashion. Whenever the kids’ minds hear the “to” and “at” and “which” bricks in the house, it doesn’t register consciously. Instead, the magical complex laybyrinthe of unconscious wiring does make sense out of it, and the language is acquired.
It’s positively Mary Poppins!