july — sept. 1857.] The Study of Living Languages. 235 



reject of course all words which will never be required, sucli as 

 those used only in learned works : next, reject all those that hard- 

 ly ever occur even in books. Next let alone those that are chiefly 

 in use only in certain particular lines of life, and are more or less 

 technical. Again, have nothing to do with any words that are not 

 commonly used in the ordinary matters of life. What can be gain- 

 ed but clear loss by burthening the young beginner with a multi- 

 tude of words, by far the greater part of those in the language, that 

 will be thus rejected, when they have nothing whatever to do with 

 his acquiring a useful knowledge of the language, and when, if re- 

 quired, they can afterwards be added in a tenth part of the time 

 that they would require at first. Probably out of twenty thousand 

 words in a language, the knowledge of 5,000 would set him so per- 

 fectly at liberty in all ordinary conversation that neither he him- 

 self nor those he converses with would be reminded that he does 

 not know all. And if occasionally a person used one of the re- 

 maining words, probably he could, not mistake the meaning of it in 

 the midst of so many known ones. And if he could not perceive 

 what it must mean, he could have no difficulty in asking the mean- 

 ing or understanding the explanation. Having thus relieved our 

 student from such a mass of useless labor, let us next divide these 

 5,000 words, or whatever the number is, into several portions, tak- 

 ing out first one thousand and then another of the least common 

 and least immediately necessary words, till we have only a thousand 

 left. Out of these we again take 250 three times and then 150 in 

 the same way, so that to begin we have only 100 of the commonest 

 words in the language, but consisting of all the different parts of 

 speech so that little sentences may be formed out of them. The 

 learner then deals with only one of these batches of words at a time, 

 not troubling himself with the others till he knows the first batch 

 as well as he does so many words of his own language. This is 

 one of the great essentials of the system proposed. Words should 

 never be partially learnt and forgotten again, nor imperfectly, that 

 is, so that their true value and use are not thoroughly known. 

 When once a word is taken up, it should of course be thoroughly 

 secured both as respects the meaning of it and its use, and it must 



