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 which 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 first time. 



After the first and 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 the student gives 

 the foreign one, the teacher immediately repeating it again and so 

 on. 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. 



