(b) That he generally focused his consciousness, that he paid attention to detail, that he studied rules and practised analysis, that he constantly established comparisons between the foreign word and the nearest native equivalent.
(c) That conditions were such that he had few or no opportunities of hearing the language used, while he was obliged to use the language himself, to forge out sentences as best he might, neglectful of accuracy and heedless of their conformity or non-conformity with authentic models.
This is conclusive; there is no doubt about it now. Those who seemingly do not possess the spontaneous capacity for assimilating foreign languages are precisely those who were unwilling to avail themselves of it, or who were precluded from availing themselves of it. And by developing their studial powers they simply inhibited the spontaneous powers and effectively prevented them from working.
No reasonable doubt remains: we are all endowed by nature with certain capacities which enable each of us, without the exercise of our powers of study, to assimilate and to use the spoken form of any colloquial language, whether native or foreign. We may avail ourselves of these powers by training ourselves deliberately to utilize them, or, having more confidence in our studial efforts, or for some reason of special expediency, we may choose to leave our spontaneous capacities in their latent state and make no use of them. We cannot, however, afford to ignore them, and it would be foolish to deny their existence.
We shall see later what steps we must take if we wish to rouse these powers from their latent state, what we must do if we wish to enlist them and have them at our disposal for the purpose of learning or of teaching a foreign language.
CHAPTER II
OUR STUDIAL CAPACITIES AND HOW TO USE THEM
We have seen that each of us possesses certain spontaneous capacities for learning how to use the spoken form of any language or variety of language. We have seen that these capacities may be either in a latent or an active state. We have seen that unless we enlist these powers in our service we are unlikely to make any real progress in language-study, either in point of quality or quantity. We shall see later by what means we may awaken our latent capacities and cause them to become active, and, incidentally, how we can exercise ourselves to make the fullest use of them.
But we also possess capacities other than these for assimilating and using a language. It is our purpose in the present chapter to see what these are, and to differentiate between them and those already described.