fuzzybabybunny:
I'm trying to understand transistor amplification here.
Uhhh... I don't see how a transistor is "amplifying" anything.
A transistor, by itself can't do anything at all, except being a paper weight for a very small piece of paper.
It needs to be connected up to something, or some things in order to do something.
What we can do with the transistor depends on what is connected to it. For some circuits, involving transistors connected to resistors, and wires, and DC power source, and some capacitors, and a sinusoidal source supplying a relatively small sinusoidal signal ------- people can create a voltage amplifier .... a small sinusoidal signal is applied to the input to the transistor amplifier circuit, and the output of the circuit could be a version of the input signal, except maybe larger by some factor --- such as a factor of -3 or even -4 or even -10.
How does it manage to achieve this? The answer comes out by learning or finding out about general behaviours of the transistor, and basic circuit theory (involving transistors and resistors and voltages and currents). Circuit theory can allow some nice equations to be derived that allows you to predict in advance the amplification factor in terms of some component values (or values related to the components).
Other circuits allow the transistor's current amplification feature to be studied. For some conditions, if a DC voltage is applied to collector terminal while the emitter terminal is grounded, and a relatively small DC current is deliberately made to flow into the base (after some particular experimental setup is carried out of course)........ then there will be conditions where the collector current will be linearly proportional to the base current. The multiplication factor (or constant of proportionality) is given some label, beta .... or something like that. And it turns out that the collector current is generally very similar to the emitter current under these conditions. Whatever the effects we want to consider ....current amplification or voltage amplication (which will be linked) ----- these relatively linear amplification properties are very useful in electronics.