Project Gutenberg's How to Teach a Foreign Language, by Otto Jespersen This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: How to Teach a Foreign Language Author: Otto Jespersen Translator: Sophia Yhlen-Olsen Bertelsen Release Date: June 20, 2017 [EBook #54943] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOW TO TEACH A FOREIGN LANGUAGE *** Produced by Henry Flower and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) [i] HOW TO TEACH A FOREIGN LANGUAGE PROGRESS IN LANGUAGE with special reference to English. By Otto Jespersen, Ph.D., Professor of English at the University of Copenhagen. 7s. 6d. SOME OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. “It appeals not only to specialists, but to all who concern themselves with that most fascinating of modern questions, the origin and development of speech. The opening chapter shows us the independent thinker and original investigator. Throughout, the destructive criticism is clear, incisive, and cogent. It cannot fail to affect in time even the manual-mongers and the examiners who expect the innocent school to reproduce the fictions of the cram-books. A philologist, who sees with his own eyes and sees straight, is a rare combination.”—Journal of Education. “Mr. Jespersen, who is still young, has long ago gained a high reputation as a phonetician. The introductory essay prefixed to the tracts before us will, we believe, secure for him a distinguished position among philological thinkers. It is long since we read so brilliant a performance of its kind.”—Academy. “Our readers will find the book as instructive as it is far removed from the dryness characteristic of most philological treatises. It furnishes material for deep thought and may almost be called a new starting-point in philology.”—Asiatic Quarterly Review. “The book is historical in its method, and attempts to show, by an examination of the typical characteristics of languages in all stages of development, what the general drift of language has been.”—Guardian. London: SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO., LTD. [ii] HOW TO TEACH A FOREIGN LANGUAGE By OTTO JESPERSEN, Ph.D. Professor of English in the University of Copenhagen TRANSLATED FROM THE DANISH ORIGINAL BY SOPHIA YHLEN-OLSEN BERTELSEN M.A. “This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proofe.”—Hamlet. Colophon LONDON SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO. LTD NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO. 1904 [iii] PREFACE When, in accordance with a wish expressed by English and American friends, I determined to have my Sprogundervisning translated into English, I found it difficult to decide what to retain and what to leave out of the original. So much of what I had written appeared to me to apply more or less exclusively to Danish schools and Danish methods, and I had too little personal experience of the practice of English teachers or of English school-books to be quite sure of the advisability in each case of including or excluding this or that remark. I have, however, made my choice to the best of my ability, and if some parts of my criticism are not altogether applicable to English methods, I hope I may be excused on the plea that what is now the really important thing is less the destruction of bad old methods than a positive indication of the new ways to be followed if we are to have thoroughly efficient teaching in modern languages. OTTO JESPERSEN. Gentofte, Near Copenhagen. [v] I About twenty years ago, when I began to be interested in a reformation of the teaching of modern languages, there were not, as there are now, numerous books and articles on the subject, but merely scattered hints, especially in the works of Sweet and Storm. It was not long, however, before the movement found itself well under headway, especially in Germany. In Scandinavia it began at the appearance of the adaptation which I had made of Felix Franke’s capital little pamphlet, “Die praktische spracherlernung auf grund der psychologie und der physiologie der sprache.” At just about the same time, Western in Norway and Lundell in Sweden came forward with similar ideas, and at the Philological Congress in Stockholm in 1886 we three struck a blow for reform. We founded a society, of course, and we gave it the name Quousque tandem (which for the benefit of those not acquainted with Latin may be rendered “Cannot we soon put an end to this?”), that Ciceronian flourish with which Viëtor had shortly before heralded his powerful little pamphlet, “Der sprachunterricht muss umkehren.” Our Scandinavian society published some small pamphlets, and for a time even a little quarterly paper. But the movement soon reached that second and more important stage when the teachers began to put the reform into practice and when the editors of school-books began to give it more and more consideration, until at present it may be said that the reformed method is well on the way to permanent favour, at least as far as younger teachers have anything to say in the matter. What is the method, then, that I allude to? Well, if the question means, what is it called, I find myself in some embarrassment, for the method resembles other pet children in this respect, that it has many names. Though none of these are quite adequate, yet if I mention them all, I can perhaps give a little preliminary notion of what the matter is all about. The method is by some called the “new” or “newer”; in England often “die neuere richtung”; by others the “reform-method,” again the “natural,” the “rational,” the “correct,” or “sensible” (why not praise one’s wares as all dealers do in their advertisements?); the “direct” comes a little nearer, the “phonetical” indicates something of its character, but not nearly enough, likewise the “phonetical transcription method,” for phonetics and phonetical transcription is not all; the “imitative” again emphasizes another point; the “analytical” (as contrasted with the constructive) could perhaps also be applied to other methods; the “concrete” calls attention to something essential, but so does the German “anschauungsmethode” too; “the conversation-method” reminds us perhaps too much of Berlitz schools; words with “anti,” like the “anticlassical,” “antigrammatical,” or “antitranslation” method, are clumsy and stupidly negative—so there is nothing left for us but to give up the attempt to find a name, and recognize that this difficulty is due to the fact that it is not one thing, but many things that we have to reform, and that is of course the reason why the reformers themselves fall into so many sub-parties: the one lays all the stress on one point, the other on another point. However, there is certainly enough to do for any one who wants to get better results out of the teaching of foreign languages than have hitherto been the rule. It also speaks much in favour of the reform that it is impossible to name the “new” method after some founder, just as in olden days we had Lancaster’s, Hamilton’s, Jacotot’s methods; later, Robertson’s, Ollendorff’s, Ahn’s, Toussaint- Langenscheidt’s, Plötz’s, Listov’s methods, and as we of later years have Berlitz’s and Gouin’s methods for the teaching of foreign languages. If in old Norse mythology, the god Heimdall had nine mothers, our reform-method has at least seven wise fathers. In this respect it differs essentially from all the methods just mentioned: each one of them is named after a single man, and he in return is as a rule only remembered as the originator of his method. Our method, on the other hand, owes its origin to men who, for other reasons, may claim a place among the most eminent linguistic scholars of the last decades (Sweet, Storm, Sievers, Sayce, Lundell, and others), and the ideas which they have conceived have been adopted and applied to life with many practical innovations and changes by a large number of educators and schoolmasters (I may mention almost at random Klinghardt, Walter, Kühn, Dörr, Quiehl, Rossmann, Wendt, Widgery, Western, Brekke); on the boundary between both groups stand especially Viëtor and Paul Passy. That shows that it is not with theoretical sophistries that we have to do; it is not the whim of one man, but the sum of all the best linguistical and pedagogical ideas of our times, which, coming from many different sources, have found each other, and have made a beautiful alliance for the purpose of overturning the old routine. Modern languages, which were formerly treated like Cinderella in our schools and universities, begin to feel of age, and want to have a word to say, because they cannot put up with various arrangements which may have been more or less satisfactory for the classical languages, but do not suit modern languages at all. These want to be treated as living, and the method of teaching them must be as elastic and adaptable as life is restless and variable. What is the object in the teaching of modern languages? Well, why have we our native tongue? Certainly in order to get the most out of a life lived in a community of our fellow-countrymen, in order to exchange thoughts, feelings and wishes with them, both by receiving something of their psychical contents and by communicating to them something of what dwells in us. Language is not an end in itself, just as little as railway tracks; it is a way of connection between souls, a means of communication. And it is not even the only one; expression of countenance, gesture, etc., yes, even a forcible box on the ear can tell me what is taking place in the mind of one of my fellow-creatures. But language is the most complete, the richest, the best means of communication; it bridges the psychical chasm between individuals in manifold cases when they otherwise would wander about isolated and cut off from all intelligent sympathy. The purpose in learning foreign languages, then, must be in order to get a way of communication with places which our native tongue cannot reach, for there too may be persons with whom I, for some reason or other, desire to exchange thoughts, or at least from whom I wish to receive thoughts. And herein really lies already the answer to the question: which languages shall we give the preference? Compare the advantage of being able to talk with the inhabitants of the Fiji Islands in their own language with the advantage of being conversant with French or German. If all that we desire or [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] all that we can ever hope to attain in any one language is to receive thoughts, to acquaint ourselves with the works of foreign authors, while we ourselves neither expect nor wish to be able to impart our own thoughts in it, it is always a question if it is not better to use translations than to learn the language itself, especially in the case of the dead languages. A translation is, to be sure, no perfect substitute for the original, but on the other hand one has to know the foreign language pretty well in order to get more out of the original than out of the translation. Then how does the balance stand between the debit-side—the work of learning the language—and the credit-side—the extra profit thus to be got from the authors’ works? It is of course a question which must be decided separately for every individual case, and there are many circumstances which may have to be considered; but most people will not lose anything if they read Tolstoi or Omar Khayyám in English. The objection may be raised that there are also other reasons for learning foreign languages. A student of comparative philology, for instance, studies languages for their own sake, without caring if they can serve him as a means of learning anything that he did not know before, or that he could learn much more conveniently in some other way; he may often be very much interested in languages which have no literature at all, or which are spoken by peoples with whom he never comes into contact. But this study, which may be compared to the study of other means of communication for their own sake, locomotive-construction, railway signal-service, etc.—only that it is probably much more interesting—is clearly a special study, which has nothing to do with the reasons why people generally learn languages. Although it undoubtedly is an advantage for every educated person to know something about the life of language, yet I think it will suffice for me merely to touch upon the theoretical study of languages here and there in the following pages, so much the more as it is never with this end in view that any language is placed on the school programme. Neither were Latin and Greek introduced into our schools for the sake of training the pupils in logic, no matter how much it may occasionally be insisted upon that exactly this is their real value. But it is not necessary to waste many words on this matter, especially since all competent classical scholars—also those who insist upon a privileged position for the classical languages in our schools—have long ago given up as unscholarly the idea that the Latin (or Greek) language should be more logical in construction than, for instance, French or English. And there is no doubt much truth in what Robert Browning says: “Learning Greek teaches Greek, and nothing else; certainly not common sense, if that have failed to precede the teaching!”[1] But on the other hand it must not be overlooked that everything which is learned with a sensible end in view, and according to a sensible method, tends in itself more or less directly to develop valuable faculties, and that especially the teaching of languages, in addition to the actual results which it gives through the contents of what one reads in foreign languages, is an excellent means of training such important faculties as— the faculty of observing (of observing correctly, of observing independently), the faculty of classifying under different points of view that which has been observed, the faculty of deducing general laws from the material collected by observation, the faculty of drawing conclusions and applying them to other cases than the ones hitherto met with, —all, of course, faculties that are nearly related—also the ability to read in general, to read intelligently, and with reflection. In the construction of our method of teaching, especially if it is to be used in schools, we must also take these things into consideration. Any instruction in languages which merely consisted in a parrot-like repetition of the words of the teacher or the book, if indeed such a method is conceivable, would not be in place in our schools, and besides, no one, so far as I know, has ever tried to introduce such a pure parrot-method there. The teacher must make the pupils feel interested in the subject; they must have a vivid conception of the reward that their work will bring them, so that it will seem worth while for them to exert themselves. They must feel that their instruction in languages gives them a key, and that there are plenty of treasures that it will open for them; they must see that the literature to which they have gained access contains numerous works which also have messages for them; and they must, to so great an extent as possible in the course of the instruction in a certain language, also have got an interest in the land and people concerned, so that they themselves will make an effort to extend their knowledge about these things. There is thus laid a good foundation for their whole life—and the saying “non scholæ sed vitæ” ought not to be interpreted, as too many (especially parents) do: learn not for the school, but in order to pass a good examination, so that you may prosper in life, and by virtue of your examination get a good position. The school ought to equip its youth in the very best manner for life, and the teacher ought not out of consideration for examination requirements to neglect or hinder anything which otherwise is good. A word about examinations later; here I simply want to warn the teacher against troubling the examination until the examination troubles him. Many of the things which I have to recommend in the following pages, I have time and again heard teachers recognize as really sensible, but they are only afraid of them on account of the examination for which they have to prepare their pupils. The answer to that is, teach in the right way, then there will be life and love in it all, and when the examination comes your pupils will know more than if your teaching from the very beginning had been fettered by examination requirements. The pupils really learn most when they continually have a feeling that it is all something useful and valuable, and that it is not too far elevated above that actual life which they either know or are beginning to get some notion of. We learn languages, then (our native tongue as well as others), so as to be enabled to get sensible first-hand communications about the thoughts of others, and so as to have for ourselves too (if possible) a means of making others [6] [7] [8] [9] partakers of our own thoughts; and if we consider what kind of communications we may be more likely to get through a foreign language than through our own, the highest purpose in the teaching of languages may perhaps be said to be the access to the best thoughts and institutions of a foreign nation, its literature, culture—in short, the spirit of the nation in the widest sense of the word. But at the same time we must remember that we cannot reach the goal with one bound, and that there are many other things on the way which are also worth taking in. We do not learn our native tongue merely so as to be able to read Shakespeare and Browning, and neither do we learn it for the sake of giving orders to the shoemaker or making out the washerwoman’s bill. So likewise in the case of foreign languages, we ought not exclusively to soar above the earth, nor on the other hand exclusively to grovel on the ground; between those two spheres there are large fields in manifold shades where it might be of great value for us to stand in direct communication with other nations. [10] II We may already from what has been said draw some conclusions as to the method which we ought to use. We ought to learn a language through sensible communications; there must be (and this as far as possible from the very first day) a certain connection in the thoughts communicated in the new language. Disconnected words are but stones for bread; one cannot say anything sensible with mere lists of words. Indeed not even disconnected sentences ought to be used, at all events, not in such a manner and to such an extent as in most books according to the old method. For there is generally just as little connexion between them as there would be in a newspaper if the same line were read all the way across from column to column. I shall take a few specimens at random from a French reader that is much used: “My aunt is my mother’s friend. My dear friend, you are speaking too rapidly. That is a good book. We are too old. This gentleman is quite sad. The boy has drowned many dogs.” When people say that instruction in languages ought to be a kind of mental gymnastics, I do not know if one of the things they have in mind is such sudden and violent leaps from one range of ideas to another. In another French schoolbook we find: “Nous sommes à Paris, vous êtes à Londres. Louise et Amélie, où êtes-vous? Nous avons trouvé la lettre sur la table. Avez-vous pris le livre? Avons-nous été à Berlin? Amélie, vous êtes triste. Louis, avez-vous vu Philippe? Sommes-nous à Londres?” The speakers seem to have a strange sense of locality. First, they say that they themselves are in Paris, but the one (the ones?) that they are speaking with are in London (conversation by telephone?); then they cannot remember if they themselves have been in Berlin; and at last they ask if they themselves are in London. Unfortunately, they get no answer, for the next sentence is, “Pierre, vous avez pris la canne.” Or take some of the books which are supposed to help Danes learn English. They are no better. In one (which appeared in 1889) we find: “The joiner has made this chair. What a fine sunshine! For whom do you make this bed? Which of you will have this box? I should like to have it. Of whom have you got this cake? I am very fond of cakes. I have borrowed a great deal of books from a public library.” From a “practical” primer in English, which appeared in its second edition in 1893, I take the following specimens: “Are the king’s horses very old? No; but the duke’s carriage is old. Is it older than your friend’s?... Has the nobleman told you the news? No, sir; but the lady has told me the news about the business and the wedding. Why do you not give the negro a house? No, sir; but I can tell you that the German has given each of the negroes a pretty little house. Has the lady a knife? Yes, the lady has two knives. Why do you not give the ladies the German’s keys to the church? The noblemen have the German’s keys.” I could give you almost any number of that kind of specimens. The ones I have chosen are not even of the very worst type, since there is (some sort of) meaning in each sentence by itself. But what shall we say when, in a German reader, to the question Wo seid ihr? we find the answer, Wir sind nicht hier! The author of that book also seems to have had a very vivid imagination when it came to the use of pluperfects. “Your book had not been large. Had you been sensible? Your horse had been old.” We ask ourselves in surprise, when did this wonderful horse then cease to be old? But that kind of material information is not given in the book; it stops at the sphinx-like remark: Dein Pferd war alt gewesen. Could it really have been that kind of schoolbooks that the Danish writer, Sören Kierkegaard, alluded to when he wrote that language had been given to man, not in order to conceal his thoughts, as Talleyrand asserted, but in order to conceal the fact that he had no thoughts? Now it must immediately be admitted that there may be a big difference in the schoolbooks made, even according to this single-sentence system. It never seems to have occurred to the authors of some of them that there might be a limit to the amount of rubbish that can be offered children under the pretext of teaching them grammar. Others again try to give sentences which are both sensible and in accordance with a child’s natural range of ideas. With respect to the latter principle, there has been steady progress from the times when the sentences either were moral rules of conduct and philosophical profundities, or selections about Greek heroes, etc. But even in the best modern books the exercises are often strangely disjointed (cf., for instance, this exercise from one of the better books: “My brother had not many lessons yesterday. Where had you been? The weather had been fine for a long time. This boy had only been in our house three or four weeks. Has your uncle had many tulips this year? How long had you had this frock?”), and even if they are not so glaringly nonsensical as some others, yet their very disconnectedness makes them bad enough. It is easy enough, however, to find something to make fun of in all such books. Let us then rather ask the reason why this system has so long been dominant. Its defenders will, of course, refer to the difficulties in all connected reading exercises; even the simplest stories contain so many grammatical forms, and so many words, that the beginner would be overwhelmed and confused by having them all thrown at him at once. There must be gradual progress in difficulty, that is, the material for instruction must be arranged in stages from very easy to more and more difficult things, and this is supposed to be attainable only by means of disconnected sentences. The principle is sound, but it is unsound to put it into practice in such a manner that other pedagogical principles which are just as sound are neglected. Should pedagogy not also demand some sense in what one treats the children to? But, as we have seen, it is not always so easy to find the sense. And should it not also be of some significance to attract the interest of the pupils? Nothing seems hard to a willing mind. That which is associated with pleasant recollections has a firmer place in the memory than dry stuff. But exercises where it alternates between the Frenchman who has taken the Englishman’s hat and the Englishman who has taken the Frenchman’s cane, or where either Marie sees Louise’s dog or Peter sees Henry’s horse—they cannot be anything but boring, even if they give the pupils ever so gradual practice in the use of the genitive. Grown persons can, of course, put [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] up with a little boredom, if they think they can attain anything by it; but in their heart of hearts they find such things killing, and so they are; yes, even killing for the linguistic sense. Children can, of course, put up with a good deal, too, when they have a teacher who can win their respect and affection; they also put up with many things only for the sake of getting good marks, or when they are stimulated by other equally unsound means. But still, it is better to avoid boring them. I suppose it is also of pedagogical importance for the teaching to be correct. But here we have just one of those points where we see what evil results may come of the system of disconnected sentences: it is so extremely easy for them to become stilted; indeed, even incorrect. Some examples may be found in the exercise already cited on p. 12, where the sentence, “For whom do you make this bed?” is not good English, at any rate, and where “a great deal of books” is a bad blunder for “a great many books.” It is really easier to write a long connected piece in a foreign language about something that one is interested in than to construct merely eight disconnected sentences for the illustration of a couple of grammatical rules, and without using other words than those the pupils already have had. As impossible, even if not positively incorrect, I consider such sentences as the following, to which any one can find many parallels:—“Tie. Do not tie. Fetch. Do not fetch.... Give. Do not give.”... Judged as thoughts they are unfinished or half-finished ideas. Judged as language, they are also very problematical. Such questions, as “Do I take?” require the necessary information as to what and when. Such fragments of sentences are never heard in real life. Finally, sentences of this kind give the pupil quite an erroneous notion of what language is on the whole, and of the relation between different languages. He is too apt to get the impression that language means a collection of words which are isolated and independent, and that there must be a corresponding word in his native tongue for each new foreign word that he learns. These words are then shoved about without any real purpose according to certain given rules, somewhat after the manner of a puzzle that was popular some years ago. The mistake thus made is by Sweet called the arithmetical fallacy, because languages are taken as collections of units where the order of the addends and the factors is immaterial. Everything that is idiomatic in the languages is quite set aside, at all events for the time being, without consideration for the fact that the most indispensable expressions often are those irrational groups which cannot be constructed merely of words and grammatical rules, expressions like “What’s the matter? I couldn’t help laughing. Serve you right. Ça va sans dire. Ça y est. Voilà qui est drôle. Wie spät haben Sie? Wer ist jetzt an der Reihe? Sie sind dran. Was ist denn los?” Where the Englishman circumstantially says “ring the bell,” the Frenchman has the short “sonnez,” etc., etc. When the pupil does not get a good deal of that kind of thing as soon as possible, but for years continues translating word-groups of the arithmetical kind until he is well drilled in all the rules of the grammar, the result is that when he is left to his own resources he takes each word of the English phrase that happens to occur to him and translates it literally into the language which he is trying to speak.[2] That is how we come to hear such ridiculous things as “Ich konnte nicht helfen zu lachen.” It is grammar that plays the chief rôle. A characteristic teacher’s report is: “In the course of the school-year we have gone through accidence as far as the third class of verbs.” The raison d’être of each sentence lies merely in its value for the grammatical exercises, so that by reading schoolbooks one often gets the impression that Frenchmen must be strictly systematical beings, who one day speak merely in futures, another day in passé définis, and who say the most disconnected things only for the sake of being able to use all the persons in the tense which for the time being happens to be the subject for conversation, while they carefully postpone the use of the subjunctive until next year. Now, as misfortune will have it, although the whole system is planned for drilling in grammar, this end is by no means attained by these too systematical exercises. The pupils get the scent of what is to be used in a certain exercise, and they use it mechanically there, but they do not learn how to transfer it to other connexions, so if they suddenly have to use a future in an exercise on the pluperfect the future form is apt to bear a suspicious resemblance to the pluperfect form; when the pupils are being drilled in the endings of the fourth declension, and a word belonging to the third declension happens to have crept in, it is very difficult to get it correctly declined without any reminiscence of fourth- class endings, etc. I once read a pedagogical article by a German schoolmaster, I think it was, who had discovered that the reason why there were so many poor Latin exercises written was that the pupils often had to apply several rules of syntax in one and the same sentence; if the sentences were only so made that each one of them contained but one grammatical phenomenon, it would soon be seen how clever the pupils could be. Yes, how pleasant it would be if life too could be so arranged as to have the difficulties come one at a time. As previously remarked, there is too little attention paid to what is idiomatical, and sentences constructed by non- natives are apt to be of the kind that never would occur to a native, even if it may be difficult enough to find positive “mistakes” in them. Many of the French and German sentences in our schoolbooks must surely have the same air of unreality for a native as not a few of those found in English primers published abroad have for an Englishman. Very closely connected with the idiomatical elements of a language are its characteristics of style, and in this respect too our schoolbooks are clumsy enough, for words which belong merely to elevated or specially poetical style are bundled together with every-day words in the very beginning of the first primer without any caution to the pupil against using them. A foreigner who wants to learn English has first of all use for words like “grief, sorrow,” but he had better postpone acquaintance with “woe,” otherwise he is as likely as not to make himself ridiculous by saying “it was a great woe to me.” “Unwilling” is more necessary than “loth,” “wash” than “lave,” “lonely” or “forsaken” than “forlorn,” etc. But on one of the very first pages of Listov’s English Reader which is written for beginners, we find “I bid him go,” which is altogether old-fashioned, stiff and bookish (for: I told him to go, I asked him to go, or I ordered ...), and in the same book “foe” is preferred to the ordinary, indispensable “enemy.” And in several English primers the unnatural [16] [17] [18] [19] “commence” is used all the way through instead of the natural “begin”; likewise the rare “purchase” for the everyday “buy”—the only reason which I can think of is that the ordinary, indispensable words follow irregular declensions and inflexions. The beginner has only use for the most everyday words; he ought to have nothing to do with the vocabulary of poetry or even of more elevated prose; like everything superfluous, it is detrimental, because it burdens the memory and hinders perfect familiarity with that which is most necessary. It will, moreover, be impossible for him to get a proper conception of the linguistic effectiveness of poetry and elevated prose, when he is so far advanced as to read the good writers, because from his very first lesson in the language he has learned the literary expressions side by side with the phrases of normal prose and everyday conversation. But even among words not belonging to the language of literature, many may without scruple be postponed in order to make room for the most necessary words, which must be learned in such a manner that one always may have them on hand without the slightest hesitation. In Miss Goldschmidt’s picture-method (which is now used a good deal outside of its native land, Denmark, and also in large part deserves the popularity and praise which it has won), I find, for instance, not less than 58 words for that many more or less intimate articles of women’s clothing; and when I in the same book under the heading “cuisine” find 46 words, among others, “bouilloire tamis, passoire, pelle à main, puisoire, lavette, canelle évier, coquetier, écumoire, entonnoir, pilon, râtelier, râpe, billot, manne,” I cannot help feeling thankful that no one ever tormented me with learning them; it seems to me I have got along pretty well in Paris and elsewhere in French conversations, just as I have read many French books, without knowing all these technical words. But, on the other hand, I have a strong notion that I should not have got along so well in conversation, and should not have been able to read French so well, if my vocabulary had been limited to the one in Miss Goldschmidt’s pictures. The usual treatment of grammar, too, involves the learning of a number of words that one has no use for. There are few words which even the stupidest pupils in French and English have so pat as “louse,” and the reason is that the plural of both “pou” and “louse” happens to be something out of the ordinary. For as soon as a word is declined differently from the usual paradigms, it has to be learned for the sake of so-called completeness. Thus we had to learn in school the rigmarole: “amussis, ravis, sitis, tussis, vis” and usually also “febris, pelvis, puppis, restis, turris, securis,” where “vis vim” (perhaps also “sitis sitim”) would have sufficed; the others (with meanings like ruler, hoarseness, rope), I am sure, never occurred in what we read of Latin literature, and as far as the last words are concerned, why it would not have made any difference anyway if we had let the accusative end in “—em,” if we had to use the word in a catch exercise. And then there was the “long rigmarole” which it was our pride to be able to run through without winking: “amnis, axis,” etc., and which doubtless has cost us all some hours of drudgery before we could quite make it stick. Of the words in it, “scrobis, sentis, torris, vectis,” at least, were entirely superfluous for us—aside from the fact that if by some wonderful chance we should come across one of the words in the course of our reading, we were sure enough to remember that the word stood in the long rigmarole, but why it stood there or what the word meant, that was apt to be quite forgotten. Well, it did not make much difference in so far as the chances were a thousand to one that for understanding the passage in question it was absolutely of no consequence if we had remembered that the word was masculine. (It may be of some comfort to add that some of them may also be feminine: the old Romans were not always as big pedants as Latin teachers would like to make them out to be.) Sweet writes: “In the German grammar I began with the word Hornung, ‘February,’ was given as an exception to the rule that nouns in -ung are feminine, and for many years no German word was more familiar to me, except perhaps petschaft, ‘seal,’ whose acquaintance I made at the same time and in the same way. But to the present day I cannot remember having met with either of them in any modern German book, still less of ever having heard them in conversation, Hornung being now entirely obsolete except in some German dialects. At last, when I began Middle High Grammar, I met with it for the first time in my life in a poem of Walther von der Vogelweide, but by this time I had forgotten all about it.”[3] In most English grammars for foreigners, the word caiman plays such an important part that the children never can forget it, and this is just because it is not caimen in the plural; likewise it is carefully inculcated on the pupils that die meaning “a stamp used for coining money” has the plural dies, but it is scarcely probable that one in a thousand will ever have any use for the word in this sense; cf. Storm’s remark on travail quoted below. Much of that kind of thing has fortunately been removed from the schoolbooks of later years, but there is no doubt still some weeding to be done. [20] [21] [22] III On the basis of the above negative criticism, we may perhaps formulate the following positive requirements for those reading selections which are to be the foundation for instruction in languages, namely that as far as possible they must (1) be connected, with a sensible meaning, (2) be interesting, lively, varied, (3) contain the most necessary material of the language first, especially the material of everyday language, (4) be correct French (German, etc.), (5) pass gradually from that which is easy to that which is more difficult, (6) yet without too much consideration for what is merely grammatically easy or difficult. This order does not indicate the relative importance or value of the requirements, which might be difficult to determine. If there should be any disagreement between them, I suppose it is generally best to try to find some practical compromise. We must now pass on to examine some of these requirements more closely. The use of connected texts in the elementary teaching of languages has already previously been tried, but it seems as if in the effort to avoid the Scylla of disconnected sentences it has been impossible to escape the Charybdis of such texts as Chateaubriand’s Atala, Dickens’ Christmas Carol (Méthode Toussaint-Langenscheidt), the New Testament, or Cæsar’s Gallic War, etc. How often after such experiments, when the pupil was overwhelmed and did not learn anything because he was to learn everything at once, has not the teacher returned in despair to the disconnected sentences. But between the two extremes there is no doubt room for the golden mean of beginning with quite short connected pieces, and then gradually, as each lesson may be lengthened, passing over to longer texts—of course this does not necessarily mean that a whole piece must always be taken for each lesson; the breaks in the lessons do not need to correspond to the breaks in the text-book. Anecdotes meet the requirements in so far as they are short connected pieces, and therefore they play such an important part in many readers. But yet they are not quite the thing, especially when they are used in too great numbers. A pointed anecdote can only be really funny once; if it is to be repeated many times, it soon becomes stale and indeed more tiresome than most other things. And just the very quality which makes it amusing makes it less valuable for teaching purposes; that is, an anecdote must by its very nature contain as few words as possible; but it is better for beginners to get a little broader colouring, so that the most necessary words and phrases may recur frequently. If many anecdotes follow one upon the other, it is not easy to avoid frequent jumps between totally different spheres of thought and accordingly between totally different worlds of words; this increases the difficulty, and the result is apt to be that words and expressions once learned are soon forgotten. Anecdotes depending upon puns cannot be appreciated at all without full familiarity with the words resembling each other, and that can only in a minority of cases be assumed for our pupils. The best way to use anecdotes in teaching languages is to let them serve as spice in or in connection with other pieces, especially descriptive pieces, so that the words used in the anecdotes may there appear in their natural surroundings. This can best be done in short stories about animals; in my own books for beginners in English, I have taken several such pieces from purely scientific works by Sir John Lubbock, Romanes, Tylor, etc. I mention these as examples of a kind of texts which seem to me to be especially attractive (but which are neither so easy to get hold of nor to concoct), because they give entertaining and sensible information about things which are often neglected in the natural science instruction itself, and at the same time they give an opportunity of learning a good deal of useful language-material without being too difficult. The pieces which are merely descriptive of nature, and which Sweet lays so much stress upon, have the advantage that they in a still greater degree allow of the employment of the most indispensable material of language, and that a number of the sentences may be made self-explanatory (v. below). There are, however, but relatively few subjects that can be dealt with in this way—the most elementary natural phenomena— and when they are not written in such a masterly manner as in Sweet’s Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Englisch, there are apt to be so many well-known truths told in these pieces that the interest flags. In deciding on what will be of interest as a selection for reading, differences in age must of course to a great extent be taken into consideration. But it is an experience which I myself have had, and in which many teachers bear me out, that beginners in a foreign language may very well be interested in certain reading matter even if they are beyond the age when corresponding things would interest them in their native language. So one must not be afraid of childish texts; but by this I do not mean to recommend a certain kind of juvenile literature which flourishes in all countries, and which aunts, especially the unmarried ones, often think that children appreciate, and so they themselves also proceed to produce it in large quantities, that is, milk-and-water stories and verses about the reward of good children and the frightful punishment of the naughty ones; both young and old find such “literature” nauseating, and it were best to avoid it in text-books in foreign languages. But there is another class of literature, that collected by folklorists, which is orally transmitted from generation to generation, and which shows its vigour by being continually amusing and by continually shooting new shoots. Much of it can successfully be used in teaching languages; and that which amuses a French child of five or six years may often amuse an English child of ten or eleven or even more, because in the foreign language it gets the charm that always is connected with the unknown. [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] Much of this material—and of other material, which, without belonging to popular tradition, is related to it—is in verse- form, which has the great advantage for our purpose, that rhythm and rhyme naturally rivet the words and expressions fast to each other, so that the memory gets hold of them like an unbreakable chain. It is only with great difficulty and with much repetition that prose sentences can be inculcated in a certain given form; but to learn verse is like play—it learns itself. If therefore the poetry of art, with its more or less unnatural language, is unsuitable for the beginner, the little witty natural verses of the genuine children’s literature are, on the other hand, excellent. But of course not even these are always pure pearls, and there are many of them to be rejected as containing impertinences, nonsense-words, fragments of antiquated language, or words which beginners have no use for; it seems to me, for instance, that Viëtor and Dörr should not have transferred the nursery rhymes wholesale (even the old forms with —th in the third person, and much more) into their otherwise excellent English reader. With respect to the requirement that the reading must be easy—or rather that there must be gradual progress from easy to difficult—it must be recognized that difficulty may depend upon several different things. In the first place, the subject-matter may be too difficult; it ought never to be beyond the horizon of the pupils. As previously remarked, in the very beginning, one may even take something simpler than what would otherwise be suitable for persons of that age. But later, on the other hand, the subject-matter ought not to be too light; it is well, as soon as possible, to use matter which really has a permanent value of its own. A large part of the reading will no doubt always be taken from lighter literature, and most of it will not cause any real difficulty as far as the comprehension of the subject-matter is concerned. But in addition to that, there ought surely to be read to a far greater extent than has hitherto been the case in modern language instruction, matter which cannot be understood without some serious thinking, articles on natural science and on human relations in the widest sense of the word, political speeches, etc. Many teachers seem to be afraid to read anything else with their pupils than the most insignificant novel-literature whose contents furnish starvation food. A little friend of mine seven years old once said to his mother: “I like that best which I can scarcely understand.” He thereby expressed the same thought as Dante when he said that man is not happy unless he strains every nerve, or Stuart Mill in his remark: “A pupil who is never required to do what he cannot do never does what he can do.” All instruction must spur the pupil on with problems that are not too easy; in the first stage of instruction in languages, there are problems enough in the purely linguistic difficulties; later on the contents of the reading, too, ought to require some independent powers of assimilation. Sometimes it may even be best to choose selections where the language is very easy, but the matter rather weighty—especially in teaching according to the reform-method, where subject-matter is necessarily assigned a more important part than hitherto, and where even an easy text can in various ways be advantageously employed as a means of training in purely linguistic skill. Even linguistic easiness or difficulty may depend upon different things. Difficulties in pronunciation ought not to be piled up, a caution applying especially to selections for the very first beginners. Some teachers try to begin with words which may be almost or wholly pronounced with sounds occurring in the native language of the pupils. Aside from the fact that in most cases it only leads to disappointment to exaggerate the resemblance between the foreign and native sounds, this principle may easily lead to slovenliness at a stage when it might involve the most dangerous consequences. The pupil ought from the very first lesson to have the clearest sensation of being on foreign ground, and he ought to realize that the foreign sounds cannot be learned without work. But the difficult sounds ought not to occur too many in succession or in too difficult combinations. It is perhaps best to begin with words of one syllable, but this need not be strictly carried through. I do not, however, attach so much importance to mere difficulties in pronunciation that I would advise an otherwise suitable opening selection in a French reader for beginners to be discarded because it contained such difficult words as manger and chien. It cannot be long, anyway, before the pupils must make acquaintance with, and, what is more, master all the sounds in the language they are about to learn. By difficulties in pronunciation here I mean the real ones, and not such apparent difficulties as are due to freaks of orthography; it is equally troublesome for a German to pronounce English pear and pair; such difficulties as are found in English scarce, fatigue, victuals, French eut, pupille, pitié, balbutier, etc., may be overcome by a panacea which I shall come to later, namely, phonetical transcription. Furthermore linguistic difficulty may be due to the use of too many new words, and in this respect the best principle at all stages is: as few new words as possible. Every one who has read such pages as often occur in Zola or Daudet, where technical expressions are abundantly piled up, will have had the experience that even with the most careful reading or study it did not take long before all the new words were just as unfamiliar as before the selection was read. Likewise, when one sets to work to learn systematic vocabularies like Plötz’s Vocabulaire Systématique, it requires enormous exertion and a long time to learn them, and it takes an amazingly short time to unlearn them again. But if, in the course of one’s rea...