july — sept. 1857.] The Study of Living Languages. 225 



the day, he will inevitably acquire a false pronunciation, unless he 

 is so thoroughly established in a correct pronunciation that there 

 is no danger of his losing it and then indeed abundant exercise of 

 his tongue, when alone, will be of the utmost use, but this at first 

 is ruinous. 



Suppose a child were shown the form of a letter and then as 

 soon as he had a rough idea of it should go on writing repetitions 

 of it without a standard before him, any body can tell what would 

 be the consequence ; at the end of a month he would be thoroughly 

 confirmed in writing such a letter as had never been seen before ; 

 and if he had occasionally the standard put before him, the conse- 

 quence would be that nine-tenths of his time would be passed in 

 learning to recede further from the original, and the other tenth in 

 trying to get rid of the habit of writing wrong and to bring himself 

 back to what was correct. 



The same is the case with the student of languages, and in ge- 

 neral they are thus constantly employed in partially learning and 

 then unlearning, and the consequence is that even where an ap- 

 proach is made to a correct use of the language nine-tenths of the 

 time employed is needlessly lost. 



A third point is to learn one thing at a time. 



If a number of things are pressing upon the attention at once, it 

 is impossible that a distinct and permanent impression can be re- 

 ceived by any mind whatever its powers. Let us consider a person 

 learning a language in the way so commonly followed. He is 

 grappling with a sentence of many words. Here he has at once to 

 consider the character, the meaning of many new words, the pro- 

 nunciation of them all, the inflexions of the nouns and verbs, the 

 syntax, the mode of expression, &c. The consequence is, his at- 

 tention is so overwhelmed and distracted that his mind is incapa- 

 ble of receiving a clear impression on any one point. No wonder 

 that so little progress is made, that the knowledge acquired is so im- 

 perfect and incorrect, and that the student is so constantly discou- 

 raged. Often his progress is one continued effort to bear up against 

 the most depressing feeling that he can never master the difficulties, 

 as a man wears himself out sometimes in trying to carry a load be« 



