How to teach a foreign language

by Otto Jespersen

Of course it is also possible to have mixed exercises of this kind. For instance, pupil A reads aloud; the teacher interrupts him at the end of a sentence, mentions what kind of change it is to undergo, and thereupon points out one of the other pupils (whose books are closed) who is to make the change. But the teacher must never allow any of these exercises to become something merely mechanical which is turned out according to a certain fixed formula; the pupils must always be trained to consider whether a newly constructed sentence makes sense or not; thereby both their linguistic intuition and their powers of logic are sharpened at the same time.

VIII

By this time we have fairly encroached upon the question as to the method to be used in training pupils in the grammar of a foreign language. I want to introduce my discussion of this subject with the following quotation from N. M. Petersen (Sprogkundskab i Norden, Collected Works, Copenhagen, 1870, ii. 297–8):

“With respect to method, the artificial one must be given up and a more natural one must take its place. According to the artificial method, the first thing done is to hand the boy a grammar and cram it into him piece by piece, for everything is in pieces; he is filled with paradigms which have no connection with each other or with anything else in the world ... he is filled with words, only half of which occur occasionally, and some never at all in what he reads. How old are not the complaints over this perverted method! how many sighs it has occasioned, how much deformity it has produced! On the other hand, the natural method of learning languages is by practice. That is the way one’s native language is acquired. The pupil becomes acquainted with the elements and absorbs them, as it were, into his soul in their entirety before he is consciously able to separate and account for the single parts and their special relations; he forms whole complete sentences without knowing which is the subject and which the object; he gradually finds out that he has to give each part of the sentence its correct endings without knowing anything about tense or case.... The logical consequence of this, then, is that as a rule one cannot begin with grammar in teaching languages to a child of ten or twelve. His first years at school ought to give him merely materials; he ought to collect experiences (that is a child’s greatest delight), but not speculate over them.”

It is now half a century ago since N. M. Petersen uttered these golden words, and still the old grammar-instruction lives and flourishes with its rigmaroles and rules and exceptions, that intensely stupid custom, the teaching of grammar to children, as Herbert Spencer calls it. Only few of the boys in our schools who have studied German for several years, are able to connect for instance um with the proper case without hesitation; but there are certainly still fewer who cannot run through durch für gegen ohne um and wider like parrots. But strangely enough this ever present phenomenon does not yet seem to have led to a general acknowledgment of the fact that these grammatical rigmaroles as a rule are scarcely worth as much as the counting-out rigmaroles of the children: eeny meeny miny mo.[19]

And, of course, paradigms which are learned by rote also belong to the category of rigmaroles. “Paradigms ought by all means to be given, but should never be learned by heart in rigmarole-fashion.” (N. M. Petersen.) Thoughtlessness and stupidity thrive excellently on this continual repetition of words as words, that is words without any mutual association, without connection in sentences. Just think of the many thousands of boys and girls who time and again recite: mourir, mourant, mort, je meurs, je mourus, and then ask how many of them, yes even of their teachers, ever happen to think that the last form in reality is impossible (at all events in conversations in this life).[20] The percentage is scarcely very large. And when conscientious philologists like Ayer and Sachs give imperative forms like nais, naissons, naissez—be born! let us be born!! be ye born!!! it cannot be denied that we are tempted to use the exclamation: “die gelehrten, die verkehrten!” Of course it is not our aim to get rid of such forms as je mourus;[21] what is wrong is the system. I condemn vivre, vivant, vécu, je vis, je vécus just as strongly as mourir, etc., even if none of these forms is really meaningless. And the reason why I reject this method of teaching languages is because it does not and cannot bring us to our desired goal. The chief absurdity, the one which it is our business to quarrel with, is that use of disconnected words for grammatical purposes, which flourishes in all our text-books.

It has often amused me to examine grown-up persons (non-philologists) in what they could remember of the instruction they had received in school in foreign languages. It seems to be extremely common that they have not the slightest idea as to what case for instance a preposition governs, but the rigmarole in which it occurs they generally know by heart. They also know ever so many scraps like der buchstabe, der friede, der funke ... or das amt, das ass, das bad, das bild, das blatt ... but why they have learned these things, and what they were supposed to be good for, to these questions there is generally no answer forthcoming. So those rigmaroles are really of no practical use whatever.

Now, of course, rigmaroles could easily be so arranged—though no one seems to have put it into practice—as to contain an indication of the object in grouping together just those words, for instance by saying durch das zimmer, für, gegen ... or durch für ... um wider mich, or das amt, die ämter, das ass ... or das amt, ämter, bäder, bilder....

But even in this improved form it seems to me that grammatical rigmaroles are of little value just because they accustom the pupils to learn and say things by rote without thinking; they are remnants of the old-fashioned would-be pedagogy where a teacher in any subject was satisfied if the pupil only “knew his lesson,” that is, could recite the words of the book, and where no one ever thought about understanding or other such-like modern inventions.