Remember when you were little and sometimes you played ball, learning about throwing and catching? You even threw it to people. And they caught it sometimes! And YOU caught it sometimes!
Lets’ break that down in terms of what was happening in your two year old self’s language acquisition process, which, at two years, was rolling right along, with all those months of uninterrupted input already in your brain.
So, with the ball, you heard someone say, “Nice catch(insert your name here)! You caught the ball!” And that repeated itself with your brother or sister or someone else. They said playfully, “(insert your name here), throw me the ball!” And you did and they caught it and said, “Hey, mom, (insert your name here) just threw me the ball and I caught it!”
Where was your concentration in those moments of playing ball? On the ball, right? Were you thinking about the word “ball”? No. But did you hear it? Yes. And you put the sound of the word ball together with the thing when you heard it mixed in with all those other words like “throw”, right?
So, over years of tossing a ball around, you learned the word ball – you learned the sound of the word and you associated it with the thing. You really didn’t need to think about any of this. It just happened, right? That’s what happened – it happened. You got to the point after hearing the word enough that you started calling the ball a ball yourself. But it took a long time for that to happen.
And then something really wonderful happened. Somebody picked you up and you got to sit on that person’s lap and they opened a book and in it was a picture of a ball and there were some weird looking squiggles beneath it that you didn’t care about. You were just noticing how the ball had a star and a red stripe but yours had a green stripe and no star.
You didn’t pay any attention to the squiggles, but each time you looked at the book, and each time the person holding the book pointed to the ball and said, “Ball!”, a part of your brain that you weren’t even aware of saw the squiggles and each time that happened you went to sleep that night and after awhile you associated the squiggles with the word ball.
You got tricked into learning to read because the word was below the picture of the ball and you didn’t even notice it but your language building machine did and so you learn to read in that way, wthout even trying!
Then, when you were older, you started to want to write things. And, since you had heard the word ball a gazillion times and had seen it in that book a lot and in other places in other books too, you could write the word ball. You wanted to! It was fun. And easy! Because you had heard it and seen it so much.
So in that way you learned to understand, speak, read and write the language. It took years. You just didn’t go to class for awhile each day, you heard it all the time! And it STILL took years!
But it was so natural! It was effortless! It was amazing! Because you never had to try! It just happened. All you had to do was play ball, and let someone read to you and point to a ball, and then you could write it when you wanted to after awhile.
In this process, not once did you have to try. Your mind was focused on the meaning. It wasn’t focused on the language. The language just happened over all those days and weeks and months and years of hearing it being asscociated with actions, images, squiggles, and it all worked because you weren’t focused on it.
We learn languages unconsciously.