STUDY OF LANGUAGES. 841 



expected to put similar beautiful and inspiring thoughts into 

 Latin, which he does, thereby stereotyping his own ignorance 

 and blunders. After a year or so thus spent, he goes on to 

 read Caesar, which he naturally views as a mere meaningless 

 assortment of irregular verbs and variegated subjunctives, 

 cunningly devised for the express purpose of puzzling 

 Enghsh-speaking schoolboys. Over all looms the gloomy 

 spectre of some examination, and, this once over, many a 

 boy leaves his Latin or French or German for evermore, and 

 in a year or two cannot read two consecutive lines of the 

 language he has studied. His study of the language has 

 been dull and wearisome throughout, and leaves as much 

 permanent impression as a child's footmarks on the sea-shore. 

 Can this result be called satisfactory ? 



Quite apart from the dry-as-dust character of this method 

 of study, it is an unscientific method. (1) It does not 

 correspond to the nature of the object to be learned, for in 

 the enormous weight it assigns to grammar it practically 

 identifies language with grammar, and grammar is not 

 language, but merely analysis of language. Hence a person 

 with no knowledge of grammar may be able to speak a 

 language correctly, while a person with a thorough knowledge 

 of the grammar of a language may be unable to speak or 

 even write the language at all. Language is the material, 

 grammar the analysis of the material. Let us get together a 

 good amount of material first, and gradually learn to analyse 

 it afterwards, as we have need, instead of arming ourselves 

 with a superfluous weight of weapons with which to attack a 

 phantom which does not yet exist. (2) This method does not 

 correspond to the nature of the subject that learns, especially 

 in the case of children. The young mind finds it very difficult 

 to grasp abstractions, and the process of starting from the 

 abstract and going on to the concrete is the reverse of the 

 natural order. The unnaturalness of attempting to learn a 

 code of abstract propositions about a language at a time when 

 the learner knows practically nothing of the language itself, 

 is shown by the fatal facility with which these rules are again 

 and again forgotten by the victim, as any practical teacher 

 can testify. Again, the logical order of grammar is often not 

 the order natural to the learner. Take Otto's German 

 Grammar for example. Everything is arranged in perfectly 

 logical order with all the rules and exceptions and exercises 

 on every one ; and what to the learner is the practical result ? 

 Why, he has learned, or rather forgotten, dozens of minute 



