JULY — SEPT. 1857.] The Study of Living Languages. 243 
self about the mode of framing the inflexions that he meets with, 
but be content to take the word with its exact English meaning as 
he finds it. In this way he should go through the first 1,000 sen- 
tences with his teacher which will perhaps take him 15 hours, or 
suppose three days' study, during uhich time he would have re- 
peated every one of the first hundred words on an average about 
a hundred and fifty times, including the separate readings of the 
list of words. 
Less than three times repetition of each word is not sufficient 
to ensure the students correcting himself when he pronounces it 
imperfectly the f!rlt time. 
After the first aifd second reading of the sentences, repeating 
each word by word, the whole sentence should be repeated in the 
same way at least three times over, the student repeating the free 
English translation after the foreign sentence. 
The readings should be repeated till every word has been heard 
and uttered suppose 600 times. During these readings the gram- 
mar of the nouns and verbs may be looked into a little ; and, lastly, 
the sentence should be learnt by heart. And when the student is 
well exercised in the pronunciation by these means, so that he can 
trust himself to utter it without first hearing it spoken, the sentence 
should be again gone over in the same way, but the teacher begin- 
ning by repeating first the English word, when tha student gives 
the foreign one, the teacher immediately repeating it again and so 
CD. But if it is found that the student cannot yet remember the 
word and pronounce it with perfect ease, they should be read over 
again in the former way. When able to do it, the whole set of 
sentences should be again gone through without the words being 
repeated individually, the teacher the first time giving the foreign 
sentence, and the next time giving first the English sentence. 
It may be supposed that all this will not be necessary ; and it 
certainly is not, in order to obtain such a knowledge as is usually 
supposed to be sufficient, that is, a knowledge which, when brought 
to the trial of conversation, is found to be of little or no use. But 
it will be found that, to obtain a really familiar acquaintance with 
this first set of words and their easy and correct pronunciation and 
•use, these multiplied repetitions are absolutely necessary. 
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