REASON IN THE TEACHING OF LANGUAGE. 325 



that is, by translation. To read a foreign language directly is to 

 think in that language : translation is thinking in our own. 



When we have, for a long time, seen in books and heard in the 

 talk of the master words associated directly with the ideas they rep- 

 resent, we have no difficulty in reproducing the orthography and pro- 

 nunciation, the first elements of writing and speaking. The phrase- 

 ology thus insensibly engraved upon the mind by repetition becomes 

 one with the thought. 



However, inconceivable as it seems, it is insisted that the principal 

 object of studying a living language is, to be able to speak it. From 

 this popular error, from this false point of departure, proceed almost 

 all the methods in vogue. They aim, for the most part, exclusively at 

 the acquisition of this art. Despising the order and the wise slowness 

 of Nature, they break the chain which binds together the great pur- 

 poses of language, neglect direct reading the inexhaustible source 

 of instruction and intellectual enjoyment and listening the most 

 useful part of conversation and of necessity resort to processes little 

 in harmony with our organization and the nature of language. 



Grammar, exercises, reading aloud, and mnemonic lessons, mere 

 word-practice the sole resource in teaching to write and speak a for- 

 eign language do not help in the least in learning to read and under- 

 stand it, nor even in learning to speak and write it, for lack of imita- 

 tion, by which means alone these arts are acquired. This, it is true, is 

 no great evil, for, out of a hundred people who learn to speak and 

 write, there are not two, perhaps, who ever have serious occasion to 

 use their knowledge. But what pains for nothing ! what a loss of 

 time ! 



Processes and Results. The art of reading English, for ex- 

 ample, is acquired rapidly, without groping, and without error, by tak- 

 ing for the first lessons familiar subjects treated in simple language, as 

 free as possible from idioms, but strictly conformed to usage and to 

 grammar ; the French text, equally free from idioms, being placed on 

 the opposite page. The triviality of the language in the first books 

 is, in the end, no hindrance to progress. The best writers, the great- 

 est orators, have begun with puerilities and commonplaces in learning 

 their own lan^uasre, and it will be the same in another if we assidu- 

 ously read good authors. 



Based on the truth that a student can translate only what he under- 

 stands, the interpretation on the opposite page presents to him the 

 thought of the foreign text : he passes, phrase by phrase, from the in- 

 terpretation to the text, that is, from the known idea to the unknown 

 words. Without pronouncing, he reads the French on the English 

 attaches to each English word the corresponding French word. In 

 accordance with reason, he proceeds from the phrase to the words, 

 from the idea to the sign. This translation is preferable to the use of 

 a dictionary, because it faithfully renders the thought of the author. 



