You really learn to think in the new language, because you have no more than vague impressions about these acts or facts in your mother tongue.
You order your thoughts in the new language, and, having done so, the words which express these are an inalienable possession.
Here is an example of an elementary ‘Series,’ showing how ‘the servant lights the fire’:
| “The servant takes a box of matches, | takes. |
| She opens the match-box, | opens. |
| She takes out a match, | takes out. |
| She shuts up the match-box, | shuts up. |
| She strikes the match on the cover, | strikes. |
| The match takes fire, | takes fire. |
| The match smokes, | smokes. |
| The match flames, | flames. |
| The match burns, | burns. |
| And spreads a smell of burning over the kitchen, | spreads. |
| The servant bends down to the hearth, | bends down. |
| Puts out her hand, | puts out. |
| Puts the match under the shavings, | puts. |
| Holds the match under the shavings, | holds. |
| The shavings take fire, | take fire. |
| The servant leaves go of the match, | leaves go. |
| Stands up again, | stands up. |
| Looks at her fire burning, | looks. |
| And puts back the box of matches in its place, | puts back.” |
But any attempt to quote gives an uncertain and unsatisfactory idea of this important work.
How does the Child learn?—Whatever may be said of M. Gouin’s methods, the steps by which he arrives at them are undoubtedly scientific. He learns from a child:
“Unhappily the child has remained up to the present a hackneyed riddle, which we have never taken sufficient trouble to decipher or examine....”
“The little child, which at the age of two years utters nothing but meaningless exclamations, at the age of three finds itself in possession of a complete language. How does it accomplish this? Does this miracle admit of explanation or not? Is it a problem of which there is a possibility of finding the unknown quantity?... The organ of language—ask the little child—is not the eye: it is the ear. The eye is made for colours, and not for sounds and words.... This tension, continuous and contrary to nature, of the organ of sight, the forced precipitancy of the visual act, produced what it was bound to produce, a disease of the eyesight.”
This refers to M. Gouin’s herculean labours in the attempt to learn German. He knew everybody’s ‘Method,’ learned the whole dictionary through, and found at the end that he did not know one word of German ‘as she is spoke.’
He returned to France, after a ten months’ absence, and found that his little nephew—whom he had left, a child of two and a half, not yet able to talk—had in the interval done what his uncle had signally failed to do. “‘What!’ I thought; ‘this child and I have been working for the same time, each at a language. He, playing round his mother, running after flowers, butterflies and birds, without weariness, without apparent effort, without even being conscious of his work, is able to say all he thinks, express all he sees, understand all he hears; and when he began his work, his intelligence was yet a futurity, a glimmer, a hope. And I, versed in the sciences, versed in philosophy, armed with a powerful will, gifted with a powerful memory ... have arrived at nothing, or at practically nothing!’”