Dec. I, 1882. 



♦ KNOWLEDGE 



427 



LEARNING LANGUAGES. 

 Bt Richard A. Proctor. 



1HAVE had a rather varied experience in learninf; 

 languages, for which acquisition, let nie note, I have 

 no exceptional aptitude, as some people have, so that my 

 experience may, peihaps, be of use to many. As I have 

 received also a great number of letters (more than eighty) 

 relating to the Hamiltonian method, I may combine what 

 I have to say on the general suliject, with a short sketch of 

 the advantages of that system. 



All the languages of which I have any knowledge I 

 learned for the purjioses solely of reading books written in 

 those languages. At school and college, indeed, I was 

 taught Latin and Greek according to the system in vogue 

 at our schools and colleges, the object of which appears to 

 my apprehension (possibly dull) to make the use of either 

 language, in the way of book-reading, appear to the 

 learner the last and most remote of all the purposes for 

 which a language can be learned. Somehow, so far from 

 appreciating, I could never, even as a boy, read without 

 ridicule the preposterous things which our Latin and 

 Greek grammars set forth to teach beginners. Nor do I 

 envy my own boys, taught from the public school 

 .grammar, such useful things as that, " B. Any finite part 

 of the verb mtvi {esse), to Le, is usually a copula or link ; 

 and a word linked by it to the subject, and completing the 

 sense, is called a complement, both together forming the 

 predicate, as — 



Predicate. 



Yet I must admire the elaborate ingenuit}' — if I ought 

 not rather to say the fiendish, boy-devuuruig malignity 

 — with which new difficulties are created. It is bad 

 enough to tell your boy that " the impersonal gerundive 

 construction implies necessity, principally in intransi- 

 tive verbs, as Coiri(/e)idum est; one iroxhl think such 

 elaborate nonseiise ought to be corrected ;" but when new 

 and various pronunciations and modes of spelling are 

 devised, when even our girls at Queen's College and Girton 

 may at one time be taught to pronounce vicissim " vieijis- 

 sim," and at another to say " We ki.*s "im, in turn," while 

 the familiar, but even then perple.xiug, cj'J^s a.ad ju.yur- 

 nwJum of our boyhood assume tiie untainiliar forms cuius 

 and iuawrcundnm, one begins to ask, What are the commis- 

 sioners in mental aberration about that they overlook their 

 work thusi Either the schoolmaster is very much abroad, 

 or one wishes that he were, and some sensible folk at home 

 would undertake the work of teaching boys Latin and 

 Greek. 



It so chances that I learned to speak French as readily 

 as Englisli when as yet I was in about that stage of Latin 

 in which the urchin Page is r^pre-sented to have been. I 

 learned French by being sent haphazard, as it were, at 

 seven years old or so, to a French coUegp. I remember 

 some boys kindlier than the rest telling me as much about 

 the French equivalent!! for f^iiglish words as their limited 

 knowledge of the latter language perniitt( d. Other French 

 was rather told me than taught mp at home. 1 suppose I 

 worked in some way or other, for on alternate Fridays 

 I was marched home in triumph, decorated with a 

 brilliantly-coloured medal (an honour to which an 

 elder brother who went there with me failed to 

 attain). 1 particularly remember the march home, 



because as I was grasped on either side by the bigger 

 boys, who walked on the trottoir, I trotted in the 

 central gutter, and reached home a spectacle for goda 

 and men ! But the work for which I was thus doubly 

 decorated I do not remember. Jly impression is I simply 

 picked up .French as in babyhood's happy but unconscious 

 hours I picked up my mother-tongue. I could jabber 

 French and a good deal of Bas Breton when the simplest 

 book in French and many simple books in English were 

 sealed to me. Thus when, at nine or ten years old, in 

 England, I was rebuked by my language teacher, at an 

 English school, for imperfect translation, I could defend 

 myself in good French, which he, having only the French 

 of '■ Stratford-atte-Bowe," could by no means understand. 

 Like Becky Sharp, under rather similar conditions, I 

 rather enjoyed these encounters. 



But the point to be noticed is that, having thus merely 

 picked up French by being spoken to in the language, with 

 occasional explanation, and having subsequently studied 

 by mvself, and enjoyably, the grammar of the language, I 

 now read French as readily, within a very little, as my own 

 language. 



Next comes Latin. Here my experience, compared with 

 what I have since obtained in other languages, which, 

 though not dead, have been learned as dead languages by 

 me, assures me that the most perfect way to ensure failure 

 in learning a language, is to begin with the careful, syste- 

 matic, and purely logical study of its parts of speech. The 

 ridiculously slow progress which all boys make with Latin 

 in the usual hammer-and-tongs grammar-and-dictionary 

 style of work, contrasts strangely with the ready way in 

 which I, who had been as dull as any with Latin, picked 

 up German without aid from any master. I am certain I 

 have given enough time to Latin to have learned more that 

 is useful of at least six languages than I ever so learned 

 of Latin. 1 have learned the kind of Latin which I want 

 — not critical, construction-balancing, word-weighing, sen- 

 tence-analysing mastery (which is useful enough for those 

 who want it), but the power to catch readily the meaning 

 of an author — but I have learned this outside of school 

 and college, and by the pleasant process of reading Latin 

 works, instead of studying the learned twaddle of the 

 Eton Latin grammar. And I could read Greek with 

 enjoyment when I was utterly ignorant about the really 

 interesting, but (for the lanyuaye) useless knowledge in 

 such books as Buttman's " Lexilogus" and the like. 



Jly method of learning Latin sind Greek was an im- 

 perfect anticipation of the Hamiltonian method, and must 

 be described before the true system. 



{To be continued.) 



OUR CHEMISTRY COLUMN. 



By Willi.vm J.\i;o, F.C.S. 



THE interest attached to the study of almost every 

 subject begins only after certain rudiments have 

 been mastered. These are, however, necessary to a proper 

 understanding and appreciation of the subject itself. Not- 

 withstanding a desire to write chemistry as unconven- 

 tionally as possible, there are yet a few preliminaries in 

 the way of definitions to be got over. Among the first 

 series of terms that must continually be used by the 

 chemist there are Element, Compound, Mixtitre. These 

 words have each distinct and exact meanings; the elements 

 are those V>odies which have never been separated into two 

 or more substances by any means known. Among the 



