Use of Wordt

The other day, I was talking along and I said something to F and he said something back and then I thought, Hey! I just used "wordt" without even thinking about it!

Wordt is the first person present tense of worden, meaning "to become." It's one of those words that is strange. You become awake. (What time become you awake?) You become born. (I became in Texas born.) So I was pretty amazed. And I used it at the end of a sentence and managed to conjugate it correctly without even thinking.

This whole thing reminded me of a woman at church, Astrid, who is German and learned Dutch pretty quickly. She is a doctor and uses it every day at work. She said it was a really amazing thing to talk without thinking about each word, and without consciously constructing each sentence. Fortunately, this talking with F is helping me to just be able to talk and express ideas. It's even become natural for me to speak to him in Dutch. It actually feels odd to speak to him in English, odd somehow, wrong.