322 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



BE A SON AGAINST ROUTINE IN THE TEACHING 



OF LANGUAGE. 



FROM THE FBENCH OF CLAUDE MAECEl. 



Part I. What Reason prescribes. 



TWO Different Classes of Languages. The mode of teaching 

 living and dead languages is nearly the same. The differences 

 between these two classes of languages, and the ends sought in study- 

 ing them, need to be better defined. 



Living languages, like the mother-tongue, are simple instruments 

 which cannot be too soon mastered for instruction in our own social 

 relations, and information of the political, scientific, and industrial life 

 of other people. But dead languages are not the depositories of sci- 

 ence, nor do they serve for the exchange of ideas ; they are studied 

 solely for the intellectual development they favor. 



A professor of Greek or Latin, who knows to its foundations the 

 language of his pupils, in teaching the ancient language, can give 

 them critical and rational instruction can call into exercise their 

 highest faculties. But a foreigner, teaching his own language, rarely 

 learns the niceties of the French, and seldom knows it as well as his 

 pupils. He cannot, therefore, in any way, use their own language to 

 aid them in learning his ; so he only attempts to give them a prac- 

 tical knowledge of it. Hence the methods of studying these two 

 classes of languages should differ essentially. Exercises in the ancient 

 languages should be a gymnastic of the mind resulting from their 

 comparison with the national idiom ; each lesson in Latin being also 

 a lesson in French. Exercises in modern languages should be vehi- 

 cles of thought without the intervention of the national idiom, and 

 they should be so familiar as to become, through reading and hear- 

 ing, sources of natural instruction. 



The complete knowledge of a language includes four distinct arts 

 reading, hearing, speaking, writing. In an ancient language we need 

 only the first of these arts. Its study should have no aim but that 

 of giving the pupils the ability to read the classical authors, and ap- 

 preciate the charm of their compositions. It is in meditating on the 

 thoughts of the great writers of antiquity, and in translating their 

 masterpieces, that we discover their beauties, and are able to transfer 

 them into our native language. 



In living languages these four arts should be the object of study. 

 To say that one class of languages is learned to be spoken, and the 

 other class to be read, does not express the exact difference of aim in 

 the two cases. The art of speaking is useless unless we understand 

 what is said, and this talent of understanding is a hundred times more 



