However, it is easy enough to take a position with respect to this first kind of irregularities; they ought to be removed from the instruction as radically as possible; they ought to be weeded out root and all to a far greater extent than has yet been done in most text-books, even if it must be admitted that something has been done in this direction of late years. It is quite another matter when we come to the other kind of irregularities, which are found in the very commonest words, in words like German ist war, kann konnte, geht ging, ich mein, mann männer. Those irregularities the pupil must learn, and learn thoroughly—there is no doubt about that. The only question is, at what stage? before or after the regular inflections? Most teachers will answer, after. That a systematic grammar first gives what is normal, that which can be expressed in general, comprehensive rules, and then afterwards mentions the exceptions, the isolated phenomena, that of course is all right. But it does not necessarily follow that the pupils ought to familiarize themselves with the forms in the same order. What is won thereby? Perhaps some advantage for the theoretical knowledge about the language. But the loss incurred by this method of procedure is undoubtedly far greater. For it will be found to be absolutely impossible to arrange texts which are the least bit suitable without using irregularly inflected words, so indispensable are they. The dread of being unsystematic by taking up exceptions immediately is one of the causes of the prevalence of the disheartening series of detached sentences without any sensible meaning. It is only by freeing ourselves from this principle which requires rules first and exceptions later that we shall be able to get good texts for the teaching of beginners. Furthermore, by beginning with the regular forms, we perhaps run the risk that the pupils will analogically apply the rule even to the exceptional words, whereas the irregular forms generally deviate so much that they preclude the possibility of such mistakes. Those who have learned that the plural in English is formed by adding s, may perhaps construct such improper forms as mans, childs, but the plural forms men and children are not apt to tempt the pupils to inflect other words after the same pattern. But the moral of this is not that we are to turn the customary method of procedure upside down, and systematically learn the exceptions first. Here, too, nature must be our guide; just as persons talking within a child’s hearing never stop to consider if the words they are using are regular or not, so we ought not to be too painfully careful in selecting or arranging the first reading-exercises in a foreign language; we ought to choose what is otherwise good and take the forms as they come, wasting no words at this stage to explain their place in the system. In other words, the deviating forms must be learned as if they were merely matters of vocabulary. If in one of the first pieces there stands Il y avait une fois un roi et une reine, it is enough for the time being if the pupil is told that il y avait = there was; the forms for “there is” and “there has been” he can learn another time when he has use for them, and then the teacher can refer back to this early piece and remind the pupil about the related form which he learned before. For beginners in French, peux—“can” is just as difficult (or easy) as peu—“little,” and faire—“make, do,” as fer—“iron,” and it makes no difference if the one is regular and the other irregular. Indeed, an irregular plural like geese is even easier for Danes than the regular bees (on account of the z-sound); likewise, it is easier for an Englishman to learn the German irregular forms of comparison besser best than regular forms like süsser süssest. Later when the time has come for a more systematic study of the grammar, it will be rather an advantage that a number of the “exceptions” already have occurred at so early a stage that they are not at all felt to be strange and unusual.[4]
On the other hand, the beginner ought to be spared such grammatical difficulties as are due to complicated sentence-structure. All sentences ought from the very beginning to be constructed as evenly, simply and clearly as possible; co-ordinate independent clauses ought to be, if not the only, at least the predominating type of sentence. Not even, for instance, in the second year of Latin instruction, although there are just as many hours devoted to Latin in a year as generally fall to the share of modern languages in the course of two or three years, is it justifiable to let the pupils read the long passages of indirect discourse in Cæsar; they ought not to occur until the pupils are so far advanced that they could easily understand the same matter when directly presented. This is also a point to be kept in mind for any one who undertakes to revise the selections for reading according to the suggestions given above.
IV
So much for the reading selections—now for the way in which they ought to be used in the classroom. I have a very vivid recollection of how most of the language lessons were conducted when I went to school, and I have a suspicion that this method of procedure has not yet quite died out, even if in many places it has more or less felt the influence of the law of change. First the “old lesson” is gone through, and that must take as little time as possible, therefore the pupil is required to be able to translate it fluently without reading it aloud first. Then we come to the “new lesson.” A boy stands up and reads a little piece out of the reader—stuttering; the words are separated from each other by pauses and various unaesthetic hm- and er- sounds, and sometimes by the teacher’s corrections, or “now hurry,” “what a terrible pronunciation!” “how do you pronounce g before e? well, you know that just as well as I do, you blockhead,” etc. All that the boy thinks about, whenever he gets an opportunity, is, what in the world can be the meaning of that word I am coming to. Then he translates, interrupted by the teacher’s corrections, or “look out,” “where is the verb,” “but what case is it,” etc. Then there are, perhaps, some grammatical questions; he is to give the principal parts of a verb or two, explain the use of a subjunctive, etc.; the questions are not asked in the foreign language and are not to be answered in that tongue. The next boy is called upon to recite in the same way, and so on until the lesson has been gone through; if there is time enough, perhaps we go through it once more, but that must be in a hurry, so we do not stop to read it first this time. The last five or six minutes are devoted to looking through the lesson for next time; the teacher translates it while the pupils follow it in their books, and perhaps exert themselves to write down the meaning of some difficult word in the margin of the reader or in a note-book.
The most prominent feature of the teaching is haste; there is much to be done, especially as examination draws on. It seems to be an established custom that the examination marks are determined by the quality of the translation, and it is in order to get practice in translating that the reading selections are gone through as many times as possible. There is not much time for reading aloud; why, when one has only learned the main principles of pronunciation, one can generally infer the pronunciation of any word from the spelling, especially in German, but also in French. I suppose it is more or less in this confidence that the teachers let a piece be translated three or four times for every time it is read aloud in the original.
How much of the foreign language does the pupil hear in the course of such a lesson? The teacher says a word now and then—for instance, when a pupil translates incorrectly; but then the attention is not directed to the pronunciation; besides, it is generally only one word that he says, and that word occurs most likely in a sentence in the pupils’ own language. Now, it is a matter of fact that even one who pronounces very well cannot get the proper French swing of a French word when it occurs in company with words of another language. The basis of articulation is different in the two languages, and it is not easy to shift from the one to the other in a moment. So it is but little that the pupil hears from his teacher. From his classmates he hears a little more, no doubt; but theirs is not exactly exemplary pronunciation, and besides, it does not interest him to pay attention to it. If he only can manage to keep the place in the book where the others are for the moment, he can very well think about other things while the others are reciting; he can, for instance, review the difficult words in the next piece, if he does not prefer to dream about his stamp collection or his bicycle. Finally, on rare occasions, he is permitted to read a couple of lines aloud in class, but it is considered merely as a sort of introduction to the main business in hand, translation. He never gets an opportunity to say anything himself in the foreign language outside of what stands in the book, and he very seldom hears others say anything that he is not following in print.
So it is no wonder that such instruction scarcely cultivates at all the pupil’s ability to understand a foreign language as it is rapidly and naturally spoken by a native. If he should hear the simplest every-day sentence in a foreign language, correctly and naturally pronounced, and he should be asked merely to repeat it, he would in nine cases out of ten betray the strangest perplexity, although he would have had no trouble whatever with a far more difficult piece which he happened to meet with in print.
But that is not all; this method has other disadvantages. The foreign words gallop past the pupil’s eye; his main object is to be able to recognize them in a vague sort of way so that they may give him the clue to the translation. Oftentimes one word thus vaguely remembered even gives him the clue to the translation of a whole sentence which he knows by heart because there was something special about it. What he gets hold of is the translation, and the whole translation often comes to his mind when he has only looked at the beginning of the sentence in the original—sometimes, however, only on condition that it stands in the same place on the page (at the top to the left, etc.), where he is used to seeing it. There is not the same inducement to remember the forms of the foreign expressions exactly. If you take a clever boy who has been taught according to the usual method and, after he has translated a little piece of his lesson, close his book and ask him to give the original of the last sentence which he has translated, it will in many cases be impossible for him to do it. I reported an example of this at the congress in Stockholm in 1886; a clever pupil was translating a piece of Mérimée’s Colomba at sight, and was doing it very well, when I made the experiment. He apparently remembered the sentence well enough in the translation, but it was slowly and with difficulty that he ventured the French: Et il pleurait comme le fils de Pietri pleurait. But in the book there stood: Et il pleura comme pleurait le fils de Pietri. It is clear that it is impossible for a pupil to get a correct conception of the radical difference between passé défini and imparfait, or of the effect of the order of words, when he pays so little attention to the French forms that he meets with. One can never get any real appreciation of the idiosyncrasies of a foreign language as long as the translation is the main object.
Let us consider for a moment the workings of a boy’s mind when it is his turn to recite and he has to translate such a sentence as, for instance: cet homme, dont elle ne voyait jamais les enfants. Cet, this, homme, man, dont, whose—now he discovers that it will not be English if he continues to take one word after the other in the French order, so he looks ahead, tries every word hurriedly; finally he finds les enfants, the children; no, I forgot, we must not have the article there in English, so merely children; back to elle, she; now he sees that ne jamais must be taken first: never; voyait, saw. So instead of taking the French words in the natural order, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, he has to skip backwards and forwards in order to get them in the order 1, 2, 3, (8), 9, 4, 5, 7, 6. In an English text-book for German schools the following sentence[5] is given for translation with numbers indicating the order in which the words are to be taken in English: 1Würden 2Sie 3nicht 6viel 7zeit 5gehabt 4haben 8wenn 9Sie 11nicht 15jenen 16brief 13zu 14schreiben 12gehabt 10hätten. In other cases, it is the pupils themselves who by means of numbers and letters (“paving letters”) smooth the difficulty of translation. Anyone who is accustomed to translate German at sight knows how when he has translated the subject of a dependent clause he silently runs through what follows, often several lines, in order to find the verb, which according to English usage must not be too far separated from its subject, and how in hastily trying each single word his attention is drawn to a number of subordinate thoughts while the main thought stands and waits, as it were. This mental process is made even more complicated by the fact that only in a minority of cases does every word in a sentence (like the simple sentence given above) in any way correspond to an English word; as a rule the translator also has to think about such questions as, does sich here mean him, or her, or himself, or herself, or itself, or oneself; does si mean so, or as, or if; is il fait to be taken as he does, he makes, he has (something done), or it does, or it is, or in still another way, etc., etc. This mental process, which is much more complicated than would generally be supposed, is far beyond the ability of the children. Therefore they often remain contented with the text-book’s, the teacher’s or the parent’s translation, which is learned partly or entirely by heart; otherwise the translation is apt to swarm with the well-known offences against the mother-tongue, word-formations, phrases, expressions, order of words, etc., which are not English. Since the teacher of course cannot put up with this murdering of the King’s English, a large part of every lesson in the foreign language has to be spent in the troublesome task of rooting out these barbarisms.