The really cool thing about language acquisition

My new hobby is reading Spot books.  You know, Spot Goes to School, Spot Can Count, Spot Bakes a Cake.  They expose me to the sort of highly contextualized language it's hard to find naturally when you're an adult, and it's highly contextualized language that aids in language acquisition.  I know this; after all, I taught ESL and studied second language acquisition.  At the same time, I feel slightly ridiculous reading Spot books to myself (even more so when I sit down to read them in the library and the little kids around stare at me with open curiosity.)  After all, I haven't (at least not yet) read through them with a dictionary to figure out what the unknown words mean.  I'm not taking notes, or even quizzing myself on vocabulary.  Am I really learning anything?

Then, today, I had a moment of epiphany.  I want to make banana bread.  In my mind the banana bread was already baked and ready, and I was going to share it with my Finnish roommates (in reality, I didn't have enough ripe bananas or vanilla, and I didn't feel like going out in the rain for them).  We're often not around at the same time, so I was mentally composing a note to go with the banana bread- hmmm, how could I write it in Finnish?  I decided the easiest thing would just be to write "banana bread for everybody¨ in Finnish.  I know banana, bread, and everybody in Finnish, but I really wasn't sure how to write "for".  I decided the "lle" ending after everybody would probably do the trick, but then I wondered why I thought that.  I'm pretty sure I've never learned that in class.  Maybe I was wrong, I decided, or maybe I'd just figured it out intuitively by hearing it somewhere.  I checked to see what google translate had to say, and wonder of wonders, it agreed with me!  (of course, it's notoriously bad for Finnish-English translation, so it might be wrong.)

It wasn't until later that it struck me- I learned the construction without realizing it by reading Spot Bakes a Cake.  In it, they bake a cake for father. And guess what, father had the "lle" ending when they baked the cake for him.  And to me, that's the really cool thing about language acquisition.  Every time I muddle through a (grammatically incorrect) encounter at the bank or asking for directions, or trying to buy a phone card, I wonder- how am I even learning anything through this?  I'm just using what I already know.  But as we use what we know, we reach out and understand a bit more, and internalize a bit more, until, some day, hopefully, I'll realize I'm not just picking up words here and there, but getting the gist of things, and then later, I'll even follow full sentences.  And it's such a slow process that we don't even realize it's happening most days, it's only when we look back that we can see progress.