NA TURE 



93 



THURSDAY, MAY 29, 1879 



i 



HOW TO LEARN A LANGUAGE 



How to Learn Danish (Dano-Norwegian). By E. C. 



Ottd. (London : Triibner and Co., 1879.) 



THE tourists who now crowd into Norway summer 

 after summer are apt to find that a better acquaint- 

 ance with the language of the country is required from 

 them than is the case in the more frequented parts of 

 Europe. They ought, therefore, to be grateful to Miss 

 Ott^ for having provided them with an e.xcellent manual 

 for acquiring the necessary knowledge, since Danish is 

 the language not only of Denmark but of the towns of 

 Norway also, though more or less varying dialects are 

 spoken by the peasants in the isolated dales. The manual 

 is composed according to the Ollendorffian method ; but 

 a systematic grammar and rules for pronunciation are 

 appended at the end, and the whole book is prefaced by 

 an interesting and instructive introduction. 



The Appendix corrects the chief defect of the method 

 oi teaching foreign languages initiated by Ollendorff. 

 This is its neglect to pay proper attention to so very im- 

 portant a matter as pronunciation and phonetics. Ollen- 

 dorff seems always to presuppose the presence of a teacher 

 who is either a native or else thoroughly acquainted with 

 the phonetic peculiarities of the language he teaches. No 

 doubt in learning a foreign tongue it is advisable to have 

 such a teacher close at hand ; but sometimes this is not 

 possible, and the possibility is admitted by Ollendorff 

 himself when he claims that his method will enable the 

 pupil to dispense with a teacher altogether. It is clear, 

 however, that Miss Ottd, though she comes to the rescue 

 of the student in regard to the pronunciation of Danish, 

 has never paid very close attention to phonetics. The 

 learner who tried to speak Danish in accordance with the 

 rules of pronunciation she has laid down for him, would 

 speak it with a very Anglicised accent indeed. Not a 

 word is said even of that marked characteristic of Danish, 

 the "stodtone" or glottal catch. For Danish pronuncia- 

 tion, it is desirable to consult Mr. Sweet's article in the 

 Transactions of the Philological Society, 1873-4. 



The very fact that so integral a part of language as 

 phonology should be thus passed over in works intended 

 to promote a conversational knowledge of foreign idioms 

 shows the unsatisfactory character of our present mode 

 of teaching languages, even at its best. It is based rather 

 on empirical haphazard than on scientific principles. The 

 method and results of comparative philology have as yet 

 had but little influence on practical education. It is the 

 old story of the divorce between the man of science and 

 the man of practice, and, as usual, education suffers. If 

 we would know how languages ought to be learned and 

 studied we must give heed to the lessons of science which 

 are also the lessons of nature. 



Language consists of sounds, not of letters, and until 

 this fact is thoroughly impressed upon the mind, it is 

 useless to expect that languages will ever be studied 

 aright. Language, moreover, is formed and moulded by 

 the unconscious action of the community as a whole, and 

 like the life of the community is in a constant state of 

 change and development. Consequently we cannot com- 

 VoL. XX. — No. 500 



press the grammar of a language into a series of rigid 

 rules, which, once laid down by the grammarian, are as 

 unalterable as the laws of the Medes and Persians. On 

 the contrary, grammar is what the community makes it ; 

 what was in vogue yesterday is forgotten today, what is 

 right to-day will be wrong to-morrow. But above all, 

 language, except for the purposes of the lexicographer, 

 consists not of words but of sentences. We shall never 

 be able to speak a foreign tongue by simply committing 

 to memory long lists of isolated words. Even if we 

 further know all the rules of the grammarians, we shall 

 find ourselves unable in actual practice to get very far in 

 stringing our words together or in understanding what is 

 said to us in return. This was not the way in which we 

 learnt our own mother-tongue, and if we would learn 

 another language easily and correctly we must set about 

 learning it as we learnt our own. 



Ollendorff had the merit of seizing hold of this im- 

 portant fact, and to this his system owes the success it 

 has obtained. Let the pupil first saturate his mind, as it 

 were, with sentences or phrases ; there will be plenty of 

 time afterwards to analyse these into words and gram- 

 matical forms. We must begin with the whole, not with 

 its parts ; analysis is the task of science, not of practical 

 education. But in both alike we must start with the 

 known, or the best known ; the unknown or less known 

 to which we work back will differ according as our object 

 is a scientific or a practical one. 



If our object is the practical one of acquiring languages 

 the less known will be those idioms which present special 

 difficulties either through the strangeness and unfamiliarity 

 of their stnicture and modes of expressing thought, or 

 still more through their being now extinct. To learn a 

 dead language in anything like a proper way is a very 

 hard matter. We must first be able to think in other 

 languages than our own and know what language really 

 is ; in other words, we must have a sound acquaintance 

 with living tongues. Until we can realise that Greek and 

 Latin are in no essential respect different from English, 

 or French, or German, that they do not consist in a 

 certain number of forms and rules learned by rote out of 

 a school-grammar, or even in the polished phrases of a 

 few literary men, but in sounds once uttered and inspired 

 with meaning by men who spoke and thought as we do, 

 the long years spent over Latin and Greek are as good as 

 wasted. It were far better to fill our minds and store our 

 memories with something which will be practically useful 

 to us in after life and at the same time afford that mental 

 training of which we hear so much. To begin our educa- 

 tion with the dead tongues and afterwards fill up the odd 

 intervals of time with a modern language or two is to 

 reverse the order of science and nature. The necessary 

 result is to produce a total misapprehension of the real 

 character of speech, a permanent inability to gain a con- 

 versational knowledge of foreign idioms, and a false and 

 generally meagre acquaintance with the classical languages 

 themselves. It is not wonderful that the small modicum 

 of Latin and Greek acquired during years of painful work 

 at school should so frequently disappear altogether as 

 soon as school is left, and considering the erroneous views 

 this small modicum of learning implies it is perhaps 

 hardly to be regretted that it should. 



When a conversational knowledge of a foreign idiom 



