VI
My experience with the college teaching of foreign languages became the subject of two magazine articles in the Independent, which attracted some attention. Professor William Lyon Phelps once recalled them in his department in Scribner’s Magazine, acknowledging this as one service I had performed for him. I can perhaps repeat the service here for a new generation.
For five years at the City College I had patiently studied Latin, Greek, and German the way my teachers taught me. I looked up the words in the dictionary and made a translation of some passage. The next day I made a translation of another passage, looking up the words for that; and if some of the words were the same ones I had looked up the day before, that made no difference, I looked them up again—and never in the entire five years did anyone point out to me that by learning the meaning of the word once and for all, I might save the trouble of looking it up hundreds of times in the course of my college career.
Of course it did happen that, involuntarily, my mind retained the meanings of many words. At the end of five years I could read very simple Latin prose at sight; but I could not read the simplest Greek or German prose without a dictionary, and it was the literal truth that I had spent thousands of hours looking up words in the dictionary. Thousands of words were as familiar to sight and sound as English words—and yet I did not know what they meant!
At Columbia I really wanted to read German, for the sake of the literature it opened up; so I hit upon the revolutionary idea of learning the meaning of a word the first time I looked it up. Instead of writing it into a translation, I wrote it into a notebook; and each day I made it my task to fix that day’s list of words in my mind. I carried my notebook about with me and studied it while I was eating, while I was dressing and shaving, while I was on my way to college. I took long walks, during which I reviewed my lists, making sure I knew the meanings of all the words I had looked up in the course of recent readings. By this means I eliminated the drudgery of dictionary hunting, and in two or three weeks was beginning to read German with pleasure.
In my usual one-track fashion, I concentrated on German literature and for a year or so read nothing else. I went through Goethe as I had once gone through Shakespeare, in a glow of delight. I read everything of Schiller and Heine, Lessing and Herder, Wagner’s operas and prose writings. I read the Golden Treasury collection of German poetry so many times that I knew it nearly by heart—as I do the English one to this day. I read the novelists down to Freitag and even tried my teeth on Kant, reading the Critique of Pure Reason more than once in the original.