REASON IN TEE STUDY OF LANGUAGE. 47 7 



seeing letters, that pronunciation is made familiar, and yet exercises 

 for the eye have the first place in our methods. It is impossible to 

 represent unknown sounds to the eye by any combination of letters 

 whatever, still less the diverse shades of intonation which characterize 

 the speech of a people. 



It is an error to believe, as is commonly done, that we cannot read a 

 foreign text, in the sense we attach to this word, without pronouncing 

 it, at least mentally. In the mother-tongue, the meaning of written 

 words is conveyed to the mind only by the sounds that they represent, 

 the ideas being a priori associated with the sounds. But the words 

 of a foreign language do not recall to the student, any more than to a 

 deaf-mute in his own language, any sound associated with- the sense. 

 There is, then, no necessity, as there is no possibility, of pronouncing 

 it. It is, in fact, with the written signs of a foreign language, as with 

 all other signs we may know their value without attaching to them 

 a sound; the Chinese characters, for example, are understood detached 

 from all pronunciation. The young child associates the sense with 

 the sound of words, and has no need to think of their orthography ; 

 in the same way, the student of a foreign language should associate 

 the sense with the orthography of words, not with their pronuncia- 

 tion. If, as the rational method prescribes, we always pronounce the 

 French when following with the eye the foreign text, we protect 

 ourselves from a false pronunciation ; for it will be impossible to pro- 

 nounce English at the same moment when the organs of speech are 

 occupied in pronouncing French. 



V. Lessons in Memory. Of all the exercises which most favor 

 ignorance in teachers who are not duly prepared, and which inspire 

 most ennui in students, the worst are those mnemonic exercises in 

 which the master acts a purely passive part, and the pupil an au- 

 tomatic one. It is said that by such means we develop the memory 

 of children, but for this no special effort is needed, as the culture of 

 memory, like that of attention, is secured by the activity of the other 

 faculties. It is more particularly in exercising the judgment that we 

 enrich the memory with useful things. The knowledge we gather 

 in the first years of life we owe to observation and experience the 

 best of masters and it is more profoundly engraved upon the mem- 

 ory than all the memorized lessons of college. The mother-tongue is 

 acquired without learning any thing by heart. 



Those who, in teaching their pupils to speak a foreign language, 

 give them words to learn, to form into phrases, commit a triple error. 

 In the first place, the child does not learn to talk by passing from 

 words to phrases. In the second place, in order to speak, he learns 

 to understand what is said to him. In the third place, no mother 

 ever attempted such a pi*oceeding : the instinct of imitation alone 

 suffices the child in learning to speak. 



The expression of thought is not aided by learning extracts from 



