How to teach a foreign language

by Otto Jespersen

Le jour se divise en vingt-quatre heures; l’heure se divise en soixante minutes, et la minute en soixante secondes.

Soixante secondes font une minute; soixante minutes font une heure; vingt-quatre heures font un jour; sept jours font une semaine; cinquante-deux semaines et quelques jours font une année; cent années font un siècle.

Here the pupil can infer the meaning of a number of words without needing the teacher’s translation. So it is only a waste of time to let the pupil himself translate such pieces—for he can do that half-asleep without looking very much at the French, and he does not learn much that way. No; let him repeat them in French until he can say them fluently, then let him isolate the ordinals: le premier, le second ..., thereupon the names of the months: janvier, février ...; thereupon go through both series backwards, and then finally answer questions at random: Comment s’appelle le troisième mois? Quel est le dixième mois? etc. Or in connexion with the second selection, let him go through all the divisions of time, first beginning with the smallest and then with the largest (with the use of the article un, une); then ask: Comment se divise l’heure? Comment se divise le jour? Combien de secondes a une minute? Trois heures, combien de minutes? Deux années, combien de mois? etc., etc. In this way it seems as if a teacher can with complete confidence continue for a long time to keep even those pupils occupied who do not know much French, without needing to mention a single English word.[11]

Now of course there are only few subjects which can thus be talked about in one self-interpreting sentence after the other: Sweet has, in his Elementarbuch, got hold of more of that sort of thing than any other author of similar text-books that I know of; but almost any text will be found to contain sentences where the general sense unmistakably indicates the meaning of the new words; the more of that kind of combinations the pupil commits to memory the better for him. The ability to infer the meaning from the context ought rather to be encouraged and practised than ought the tendency to go by resemblances to words in the mother-tongue or in other languages; even if much may be learned in this way (Eng. send, German senden; Eng. ruin, Ger. French ruine, etc.), yet there is still reason to caution against too much confidence in resemblances, for they often lead us astray (even in the case of “etymologically identical words”). Most of the really valuable associations of this kind come of their own accord.

But to continue, the new words may simply be explained in the language to the pupil—this of course really means that the teacher puts the word into a self-interpreting sentence, so it is merely a subdivision of what we have just been speaking about. Anyone who has been accustomed to use the excellent French and English dictionaries, large or small, all the way from Littré and Murray to the little Larousse or Annandale’s Concise, knows how often he has been able to find in them quite sufficient explanations of unfamiliar words. Why not use this experience too in the teaching of foreign languages? Thus, for instance, explain veuf: Un veuf est un homme dont la femme est morte; une veuve est une femme dont le mari est mort. This explanation, to be sure, contains no more information than is to be got out of the simple translation “widower” (“widow”); but there are cases where an explanation gives better information than a translation. It is not improbable that many Englishmen, when given the translation primage or hat-money for German kapplaken, will remain just as wise as they were before, but they will immediately understand it if it is explained in German: prämiengeld, das früher dem schiffskapitän ausser der fracht gezahlt wurde, ursprünglich freiwilliges geschenk, dann vertragsmässig bestimmt. The English word dentil is in English-German dictionaries translated by kälberzahn, but I suppose that most Germans would get more out of Annandale’s definition: “the name of the little cubes or square blocks often cut for ornament on Greek cornices,” or Funk-Wagnalls’ definition: “One of a series of small square tooth-like ornamental blocks in the bed-moulding of the cornices of some Ionic and other entablatures” (here even an instructive illustration). Well, such technical words, where we do not even know the English term, we shall scarcely have much use for in school; but sometimes on account of the chance vagaries of language a translation does not give as exact an idea as an explanation. If I say that stockwerk means floor, I run the risk of getting an exercise with stockwerk used where there ought to be fussboden; but if I explain it as “eine der horizontalen einteilungen eines hauses,” or something like that, there is no danger of any misunderstanding.

On the other hand, it must of course be admitted that there are many words where an English translation gives the information required more quickly and more clearly than it could be given in a long explanation in the foreign language; and the teacher ought to consider in each separate case which of the two ways of helping the pupil is to be preferred. Still he must not let laziness influence him to give the translation, which of course is always easiest for him, but he must remember that an explanation in the language always has the great advantage that the pupil, in addition to the new words, hears a number of others which he thereby reviews, as it were, and that the pupil is for the time being wholly occupied with the foreign language. Besides, these explanations amuse the pupils because they get more intellectual work out of them than out of translations, which are given to them gratis.

However, such explanations ought perhaps not to be used to any great extent in the glossaries of text-books, especially in readers for beginners; here it is best to weave them into the text itself. In the first place, in such glossaries or notes, the explanations naturally become drier and more like definitions than is necessary; in the second place, the pupil who does not feel inclined to read those few lines through is tempted to get some comrade, a parent, or a sister to tell him in short the meaning of the word: that is, to translate it. To counteract this by always requiring the pupil to commit the given explanation to memory is not exactly a wise plan, since it may easily lead to mere thoughtless memory-work. For the glossary ought to play no more important part in really good teaching for beginners than as a help to the forgetful pupil in his home-preparation, where he can look up the meaning (and pronunciation) of a word which he cannot remember, I do not hesitate to use translation there.[12]

The explanations in the foreign language are especially in place when the teacher assigns the lesson and goes through it orally. This must be done with the greatest care and with a view to giving the pupils a really full and all round insight into the new selection to be read—with as much life and as few English words and sentences as possible. Much depends upon the way in which the teacher reads the piece; many pieces can be read in such a way that the pupils cannot help understanding them: for instance, by the use of stress, emphasis of contrasts, change of voice, etc. And then he can point to various things by way of illustration—and it does no harm to point at the window, for instance, on coming across the word fenêtre, even if the class has had that word before. Many words can be made clear by means of gestures, etc.; scie, for instance, can be illustrated by a sawing movement accompanied by a wheezing sound; for tailler, it is only necessary to cut for half a second with an imaginary knife; thus the meaning of boire, chanter, coup de pied, grimper, joyeux, mécontent, pleurer, dormir, taper, and many other words can be given; as a rule, merely little (not noisy!) suggestions are necessary for the class to understand immediately.

Finally there are circumlocutions in the language, not straightforward definitions as in the dictionaries, but also other explanations; often it is only necessary to lead the thoughts of the pupils in upon the right track. On coming across German hauptstadt, for instance, the teacher can say: London ist die hauptstadt Englands, Paris ist die hauptstadt Frankreichs, und Kopenhagen ist die hauptstadt Dänemarks—and then ask one of the pupils: Heinrich, weisst du jetzt was hauptstadt bedeutet? Perhaps he will answer, “Capital,” but then the teacher can say: Ganz richtig, aber kannst du nicht das wort auf deutsch erklären? The pupil: Ja, die hauptstadt ist die grösste stadt eines landes. The teacher: Ja wohl, es ist die erste stadt, die grösste stadt, die wichtigste oder bedeutendste stadt eines landes. Then he may add: Nun, Johan, kannst du andere hauptstädte Europas anführen, and when he has mentioned a few, the teacher says: Schön, das genügt, and passes on. Even if many words are used, yet they are not superfluous because they are foreign words, and therefore a few minutes’ conversation in this manner is about just as useful as if a whole page had been read in the language. And the pupils will ever after remember the meaning of the word hauptstadt much better than if the teacher had simply told them the translation and then continued with the reading. In every separate case, the teacher must feel his way to decide where there yet remains something that is not understood, and where further explanation would be superfluous or tiresome; that is also one of the reasons why such circumlocutions had better be left to the teacher than included in the text-book.