Very closely connected with the idiomatical elements of a language are its characteristics of style, and in this respect too our schoolbooks are clumsy enough, for words which belong merely to elevated or specially poetical style are bundled together with every-day words in the very beginning of the first primer without any caution to the pupil against using them. A foreigner who wants to learn English has first of all use for words like “grief, sorrow,” but he had better postpone acquaintance with “woe,” otherwise he is as likely as not to make himself ridiculous by saying “it was a great woe to me.” “Unwilling” is more necessary than “loth,” “wash” than “lave,” “lonely” or “forsaken” than “forlorn,” etc. But on one of the very first pages of Listov’s English Reader which is written for beginners, we find “I bid him go,” which is altogether old-fashioned, stiff and bookish (for: I told him to go, I asked him to go, or I ordered ...), and in the same book “foe” is preferred to the ordinary, indispensable “enemy.” And in several English primers the unnatural “commence” is used all the way through instead of the natural “begin”; likewise the rare “purchase” for the everyday “buy”—the only reason which I can think of is that the ordinary, indispensable words follow irregular declensions and inflexions.
The beginner has only use for the most everyday words; he ought to have nothing to do with the vocabulary of poetry or even of more elevated prose; like everything superfluous, it is detrimental, because it burdens the memory and hinders perfect familiarity with that which is most necessary. It will, moreover, be impossible for him to get a proper conception of the linguistic effectiveness of poetry and elevated prose, when he is so far advanced as to read the good writers, because from his very first lesson in the language he has learned the literary expressions side by side with the phrases of normal prose and everyday conversation. But even among words not belonging to the language of literature, many may without scruple be postponed in order to make room for the most necessary words, which must be learned in such a manner that one always may have them on hand without the slightest hesitation. In Miss Goldschmidt’s picture-method (which is now used a good deal outside of its native land, Denmark, and also in large part deserves the popularity and praise which it has won), I find, for instance, not less than 58 words for that many more or less intimate articles of women’s clothing; and when I in the same book under the heading “cuisine” find 46 words, among others, “bouilloire tamis, passoire, pelle à main, puisoire, lavette, canelle évier, coquetier, écumoire, entonnoir, pilon, râtelier, râpe, billot, manne,” I cannot help feeling thankful that no one ever tormented me with learning them; it seems to me I have got along pretty well in Paris and elsewhere in French conversations, just as I have read many French books, without knowing all these technical words. But, on the other hand, I have a strong notion that I should not have got along so well in conversation, and should not have been able to read French so well, if my vocabulary had been limited to the one in Miss Goldschmidt’s pictures.
The usual treatment of grammar, too, involves the learning of a number of words that one has no use for. There are few words which even the stupidest pupils in French and English have so pat as “louse,” and the reason is that the plural of both “pou” and “louse” happens to be something out of the ordinary. For as soon as a word is declined differently from the usual paradigms, it has to be learned for the sake of so-called completeness. Thus we had to learn in school the rigmarole: “amussis, ravis, sitis, tussis, vis” and usually also “febris, pelvis, puppis, restis, turris, securis,” where “vis vim” (perhaps also “sitis sitim”) would have sufficed; the others (with meanings like ruler, hoarseness, rope), I am sure, never occurred in what we read of Latin literature, and as far as the last words are concerned, why it would not have made any difference anyway if we had let the accusative end in “—em,” if we had to use the word in a catch exercise. And then there was the “long rigmarole” which it was our pride to be able to run through without winking: “amnis, axis,” etc., and which doubtless has cost us all some hours of drudgery before we could quite make it stick. Of the words in it, “scrobis, sentis, torris, vectis,” at least, were entirely superfluous for us—aside from the fact that if by some wonderful chance we should come across one of the words in the course of our reading, we were sure enough to remember that the word stood in the long rigmarole, but why it stood there or what the word meant, that was apt to be quite forgotten. Well, it did not make much difference in so far as the chances were a thousand to one that for understanding the passage in question it was absolutely of no consequence if we had remembered that the word was masculine. (It may be of some comfort to add that some of them may also be feminine: the old Romans were not always as big pedants as Latin teachers would like to make them out to be.) Sweet writes: “In the German grammar I began with the word Hornung, ‘February,’ was given as an exception to the rule that nouns in -ung are feminine, and for many years no German word was more familiar to me, except perhaps petschaft, ‘seal,’ whose acquaintance I made at the same time and in the same way. But to the present day I cannot remember having met with either of them in any modern German book, still less of ever having heard them in conversation, Hornung being now entirely obsolete except in some German dialects. At last, when I began Middle High Grammar, I met with it for the first time in my life in a poem of Walther von der Vogelweide, but by this time I had forgotten all about it.”[3]
In most English grammars for foreigners, the word caiman plays such an important part that the children never can forget it, and this is just because it is not caimen in the plural; likewise it is carefully inculcated on the pupils that die meaning “a stamp used for coining money” has the plural dies, but it is scarcely probable that one in a thousand will ever have any use for the word in this sense; cf. Storm’s remark on travail quoted below.
Much of that kind of thing has fortunately been removed from the schoolbooks of later years, but there is no doubt still some weeding to be done.
III
On the basis of the above negative criticism, we may perhaps formulate the following positive requirements for those reading selections which are to be the foundation for instruction in languages, namely that as far as possible they must
(1) be connected, with a sensible meaning,
(2) be interesting, lively, varied,