Chapter VI: Preface (6)

With respect to [p, t, k], it is well known that in French they have not the aspiration that they have in English; since the difference is not so great, however, the English sounds may perhaps be used unchanged in the beginning. Then if one of the pupils notices the difference, which he perhaps will express by saying that the teacher pronounces [b] when there stands [p] in the book, or possibly by merely trying to imitate the teacher’s sound by means of his own English [b], his attention may be called to the little breath which there always is between the opening of the English [p] and the vowel itself; this is not found in French, where the vowel after [p, t, k] comes exactly at the same moment as the opening takes place (either by the lips or the tongue), and therefore they sound to us like [b, d, g] (_capitaine_ as if it were gabidɛn). Try a [p] without a vowel after it, first with a strong breath (somewhat like when you pooh-pooh something, but without any voice), then without any breath like a man puffing at his pipe (about the same sound as when soap bubbles burst); and then try to place a vowel after it[47]; it must come immediately, just as quickly as the movements of a soldier after the drill-master’s command. Then [t] and [k] may be taken up in the same manner.

The French division into syllables (_il a_ =i | la, _chaque écolier_ = ʃa | ke | kɔ | lje, | etc.) is best learned by pure imitation, likewise the distribution of stress (accent); by reciting or reading connectedly to the pupils and by always requiring them to say _the whole sentence together without any pause_, the teacher can counteract their tendency to pronounce each word separately in that monotone which is intolerable. Thus _il a été ici_ is said all together in one with the vowels gliding over into each other, _a + é_ sounding somewhat similar to [ai] in _lie_, and _é + i_ to [ei] in _lay_.

German sounds are somewhat easier for Englishmen than French sounds, but yet there are several points to be noticed. In the case of some sounds, any skilled teacher will be able to follow the suggestions given for French, mutatis mutandis; in the case of others, like the two _ch-_ sounds, he must in an analogous manner adapt his theoretical knowledge in phonetics to the practical needs of teaching.

Some people have found it inconsistent that I have no partiality for didactic theorizing in questions of grammar, but myself employ theoretical explanations in questions of phonetics. The explanation is not far to seek. Theoretical grammar, as it is generally studied, is more abstract, it is difficult, it is very comprehensive, and still it does not lead to the desired goal, which is grammatical correctness; the theory of sound which we want introduced is more concrete and it is easy, it is more limited, and it actually leads to the desired goal, which is a good pronunciation. This last assertion is proved by the experiences of numerous teachers in various lands.

Of late years, it has become more and more usual in schools to use a sound-chart in connection with the instruction in languages. On this chart, all the sounds of the language which is being studied are arranged in systematic order, and are indicated with such large letters that they can be seen by the whole class; various finesses are often used, as for instance to give the voiced and voiceless sounds different colours.[48] I myself have not used this contrivance, but I have heard from several foreign teachers, and now from a couple of Danish teachers too, that they are very well satisfied with it. The teacher points to a letter and gets either the whole class or one of the pupils to say the corresponding sound; or the teacher may let A mention some sound or other, and B, who is standing at the blackboard, shows that he has caught it by repeating it and at the same time pointing at the symbol; or if C makes a mistake in the pronunciation of a word which he is reading (or saying) D is to point, first to the symbol for the wrong sound, and then to the right one, etc. In this way, much writing on the blackboard, which would otherwise be necessary, is saved; and besides, it may be of great benefit for the pupils always to have all the sounds in a connected system before their eyes (even if the teacher of course never intends to examine them in the whole phonetical system of the language as such).

The _elements of phonetical transcription_ are learned, as we have seen, together with the corresponding sounds themselves. Now what is the use of the phonetical transcription itself? It seems to be commonly supposed that its votaries claim by its help to have “given the pupils a better comprehension of the single sounds and to have taught them more easily to produce them;” its opponents attack this assertion and strike it down with true Quixotic zeal without stopping to think that it has never been set up by the advocates of phonetical transcription at all. These advocates themselves know as well as anyone what is but natural, namely, that a boy does not of his own accord pronounce a French nasal correctly merely because he has been shown the symbol [ɔ̃]. The pronunciation of the single sounds must be learned in other ways, as has been shown above, and for that purpose alone, all writing could very well be entirely dispensed with without resulting in any essential change in the character of the instruction. When, however, we use phonetical transcription already at the first stage, it is partly on account of the excellent help which it will afford later for quite a different purpose, which I shall come to immediately, partly because it really is of some _help_ in the teaching of the sound-formation proper. It saves the teacher a great deal of repetition, since instead of always saying the sound himself, he can point to the symbol and get one of the clever pupils to say it for the others; it makes the pupils see more clearly how many different sounds there are for them to pay attention to (while in exclusively oral instruction, perhaps one pupil will be inclined to hear [ɑ̃] and [ɛ̃] as one sound, another pupil, [ɑ̃] and [ɔ̃] as one sound); finally, the homogeneousness of the symbols will help the pupils more easily to comprehend the nature of the sounds themselves; when they have learned to pronounce [ɔ̃], they will get the run of all the other nasal vowels more quickly when they see the same flourish over them all; the double parallelism in the four symbols

s ʃ
z ʒ

will aid them in learning the corresponding relations between the sounds themselves.

However, in order to understand the greatest and the proper value of phonetical transcription, it is necessary to have well in mind the fact that there are two essentially different kinds of mistakes in pronunciation--

A. Mistakes in the formation of the sounds, and

B. Mistakes in the employment of the sounds.

We have mistakes belonging to Class A, for instance, when Englishmen use the _ng_ combination in place of the French nasals, or when they diphthongize the French long, pure vowels, when they pronounce _ʃ_ or _k_ instead of German _ch_, or [z] or [s] for German _z_ [ts], [ə·], as in _cur_, instead of [œ·r] in French _cœur_, when they pronounce French _dû_ like the English _due_, etc.

Mistakes belonging to Class B arise if you pronounce French _gent_ like _gant_, _peut_ like _put_, or vice versâ _eut_ like [ø], German _frass_ or _fuss_ with a short, or _nass_ or _nuss_ with a long vowel, _bischen_ with [ʃ], etc.

Both kinds of mistakes may occur in the same word, as when _München_ is pronounced [minkən] or [mjuŋkən] instead of [mynçen].

The mistakes belonging to class A are not due to the orthography; those mistakes we can also make in languages whose spelling corresponds to the pronunciation; they are largely due to our native habits of articulation, and they are to be counteracted by means of the phonetical training which has been described above. If the foreign sounds have once been well learned in the introductory course, this kind of mistakes can only occur through carelessness or through the lack of continued practice.

Mistakes in the employment of the sounds (class B) however, are as a rule due to disagreement between the pronunciation and the orthography of each language; they are not caused by our native habits of articulation, and even those that have learned all the foreign sounds perfectly (indeed even the natives themselves) are liable to make them in every new word which they see written, but have never heard.

_It is this last kind of mistake that phonetical transcription helps us to avoid_, it protects us against the mistakes which the different national orthographies actually seduce us to make. Phonetical transcription is necessary in the teaching of all languages, but of course, it may deviate from the ordinary orthography in greater or less degree in the different languages. In Finnish and Spanish, the orthography is so nearly phonetical that only relatively few changes are necessary in order to indicate the pronunciation; in Italian, almost all that is needed is to indicate if _e_ and _o_ are open or closed, if _s_ and _z_ are voiced [z, dz] or voiceless [s, ts], and which single consonants are to be pronounced double (long). In German, the orthography is already much more capricious, but in languages like French, Danish, and English, the number of conflicting rules with all their exceptions is so great that the phonetical transcription necessarily has quite a different appearance from the traditional spelling.

Max Müller once said that the English orthography is a national misfortune, and Viëtor has improved upon this observation by declaring that it is an international misfortune, since it is not only Englishmen but also all educated persons in other lands who have to be bothered with it. Now, by means of phonetical transcription the words of the foreign language are presented to us in a kind of normal or ideal orthography, where every letter always signifies the same sound, and every sound is always indicated in the same manner.

Some persons urge the objection against the use of phonetical transcription that it can never be made so perfect that it can show all the shades of intonation, etc., in the spoken language, so that it cannot take the place of a teacher’s oral instruction. But we have never maintained that it could; aside from private study without a teacher, which must needs always be more or less imperfect, we have always emphasized the exceedingly great importance of the teacher pronouncing the words for the pupils, and we have not recommended phonetical transcription as something to replace, but as something to support, the teacher’s oral instruction in pronunciation. Even if it misses some of the very finest shades, it may still be of benefit, just as a table of logarithms can be very useful even if the numbers are not carried out farther than to the fourth decimal place.

Other opponents again have exactly the reverse objection to make, that our system of sound-symbols is too delicately detailed for school use. Even if many people only say this because they confuse the phonetical transcription which is used in scientific works with the far simpler transcription which we want to introduce for school use, and which is by no means beyond the powers of comprehension of an ordinary pupil, still we have an answer right at hand. We are aiming at (and attaining) greater exactness than our predecessors cared for, but this is very necessary too, for the old school pronunciation was too unintelligible to the native. Besides, our system is constructed on such simple principles, that we attain to a higher degree of exactness with less trouble than you do with far more difficult means. When mathematicians began to designate the value of π in decimal form (3·1416) instead of the fractional form 22/7, they not only attained greater exactness but also greater ease in using the quantity in long calculations, since the decimal is easier to handle than the fraction. Our phonetical transcription may pride itself on exactly corresponding advantages.

It has already been tried in many old readers (to say nothing of the dictionaries) to counteract the injurious influence of the orthography on the pronunciation by means of different systems of designating the pronunciation, such as numbers over the vowels, strokes denoting length and curves denoting shortness, italicizing of the _s_’s which ought to be voiced, or in other places italicizing of the silent letters, dots and flourishes above and under the letters. All such systems, just because they try to deviate as little as possible from the orthography, necessarily adopt a number of its caprices and thus become too complicated to be of any real benefit to the pupils. But the phoneticians, by starting out from rational principles, have succeeded in creating systems of phonetical transcription which really meet all reasonable demands in the way of exactness and simplicity.[49] That they really are simple and easy to learn has been proved to me more than once in striking ways; in several schools where my books are used but where the teacher has been afraid of the phonetical transcription, the children have resorted to it of their own accord, when they came to a word that they did not know how to pronounce; several parents have also told me that they have familiarized themselves with the phonetical transcription in the books which their children used and they did not find it at all difficult.

Perhaps it is worth while here to consider the four ways in which it is possible to communicate the material of a foreign language to pupils. Either (1) the teacher may not let them use any writing at all, but give them everything orally; or (2) he may give them the orthography alone; or (3) he may give them orthography and phonetical transcription together; or finally (4) he may give them phonetical transcription alone.

(1) The first way obviously has the advantage that there is no sound-symbol whatever to confuse the clear apprehension of the pupils; it resembles the manner in which a child learns its mother tongue. It will also be the more in place the more the instruction can be brought to resemble the way in which a child first acquires language, that is, where there is only one pupil, or at least very few; where the pupil (pupils) is (are) not very old, and especially not yet quite familiar with the secrets of writing; where the teacher is a native; and above all, where there is ample time. For we must not shut our eyes to the fact that this exclusively oral instruction in languages takes exceedingly much time; much repetition is necessary, and the teacher has to have great patience. In schools it is only possible to have purely oral instruction as a short preliminary course of a couple of months at the most, before passing over to the use of writing in some form or other. Walter, who has tried both, is emphatically of the opinion that in class instruction phonetical transcription is much to be preferred to purely oral instruction, because the latter wastes an enormous amount of time, and the teacher cannot feel nearly so sure that the whole class is able to follow.

(2) The pupils are immediately allowed to see the traditional orthography, and the teacher gives them the pronunciation orally. The eternal repetition and the painful small corrections which this method craves make the lessons bothersome for both the teacher and the pupils, who almost always become slovenly out of sheer discouragement over the prodigious task before them. Of course there are some rules for the relations between orthography and pronunciation, but unfortunately there are so few without exceptions that certainty cannot be attained by their means.

(3) The pupils are taught the traditional spelling from the very beginning, but at the same time they are given an antidote in the shape of phonetical transcription, either in the form that every new word is phonetically transcribed in the glossary, or that (in addition) the reading selections themselves are transcribed. To be sure the advantages of phonetical transcription are made use of by this method; several teachers have expressed their satisfaction at the results thus obtained, and I have no doubt that they are better than when phonetical transcription is dispensed with. However, I am convinced that by this method it is difficult sometimes to prevent the less intelligent pupils from confusing the two systems of spelling, so that they neither learn the pronunciation nor the orthography very well.

(4) Therefore I have always (like the majority of the advocates of phonetical transcription) preferred to let beginners be employed only with phonetical transcription for some time, so that they may become quite familiar not only with the system of sound-symbols, but also with a good deal of the material of the language before they pass on to seeing the words in their orthographical shape too. The principle to be followed here is that of not allowing the difficulties to pile up, but overcoming them one by one. When the pupils know the symbols after the first few lessons, it causes them no difficulty whatever to read the texts; these themselves (together with the meaning of the words, the grammatical forms, etc.) are therefore far more easy to learn than if the caprices of the orthography had to be mastered _at the same time_.

For this method, connected texts in phonetical transcription are of course necessary, but such texts are also to be recommended to those who follow method No. 3, since there are many points of pronunciation which cannot come up at all in the transcriptions of the single words in the glossary, such points as appear only in combinations of words, in connected discourse. There is, for instance, French [ə] in _le_, _de_, _demande_, _devenir_, _quatre_, etc., etc., which is sometimes pronounced and sometimes omitted, according to the number of consonants coming immediately before or after the [ə]: _à devenir_ [advəni·r], _pour devenir_ [purdəvni·r], etc.; there is the varying treatment of the English _r_; there are double forms due to the influence of sentence-stress, such as [kæn] and [kən] (= _can_), and many other phenomena of that kind, which it is really necessary to pay attention to, since no sentence can be pronounced naturally without consideration for these points, and since we cannot understand the natives without being familiar with them[50]--for we cannot require the French to make their language stiff and do violence to all their natural habits of speech to suit us. Only by using connected texts in phonetical transcription can the teacher require the pupils from the very beginning to read the foreign language connectedly, intelligently, and with some expression.

In conversations on the subject, I have so often had to answer the question as to whether I also want the pupils to learn to _write_ phonetical transcription, that I must devote a few lines to that question here too. Of course they must write phonetical transcription, but _learn_ it--well, that is scarcely necessary, for it will not entail the least bit of extra work or trouble for them. They learn the symbols, and when they know them they can write any word whatever in phonetical transcription, if they only know how to pronounce it; this is a thing which follows of its own accord from the very nature of phonetical transcription. Dictation, in which the pupils are to write in phonetical transcription what the teacher says to them, presupposes only a correct apprehension of the sounds, and is a very good test as to whether they have heard accurately (cf. p. 95).

How long is a teacher to continue to use exclusively phonetical transcription? That is one of the most difficult questions, and I cannot venture to give a decided answer. The answer will surely always depend partly upon the age and maturity of the pupils and upon how much time can be spent upon the language on the whole. I myself have even dared to go so far that in teaching a class in English, when I only had two hours a week for two years before the final examination, I spent the whole of the first year on phonetical transcription (Sweet’s _Elementarbuch_), and I did not regret it. In French in the lower classes, I once at least used phonetical transcription more than a year, and the only difficulty arose when some boys came in in the course of the year from other schools. At other times, again, I have made the course in phonetical transcription shorter, and on the whole I have experimented in various ways without coming to any certain result--except this: _continue with phonetical transcription as long as possible_. For there is relatively so much more of the language itself learned in this way, that I have not the slightest doubt that the pupil who, with the same number of lessons a week, and at the same age, has read phonetical transcription for two years and orthography for half a year knows more of the language (not only of the pronunciation!) than the pupil who has used phonetical transcription for half a year and thereupon orthography for two and a half years (in all half a year more than the first boy). And then the phonetical transcription itself is such a fine means of training the pupils to minute exactness, because they really have to be constantly on the lookout in order to read neither more nor less than each symbol indicates; therefore I attach great _educational_ significance to phonetical transcription.

But of course we have to begin to learn the orthography some time; and I suppose it is this transition more than anything else that has frightened people away from using phonetical transcription, because they imagine that it must be extremely difficult. But now all those who have dared to try phonetical transcription unanimously declare that they were surprised at the ease with which the transition took place; there was no trouble worth mentioning either for the teacher or the pupils; and they were surprised at the accuracy in orthography displayed by pupils who had been taught in this way. The psychological reason for this is probably to be found in the sharper perception which these pupils necessarily get of the difference between sound and writing, together with the fact that they are not compelled like the others to learn many things at a time (spelling, pronunciation, meaning, inflection), but the orthography is separated out as something which is to be learned by itself about words with whose pronunciation and meaning they have already become quite familiar.

The best way of making the transition seems to be in going over some of the selections which have already been read and learned. First, the teacher says a few words about orthography in general, basing his remarks on English spelling; he may call attention to the silent letters in _night_, _know_, the ambiguity of the vowels in _home_, _honest_, etc. Then a French piece the pupils know already is shown to them in orthographical dress; it is gone through word by word in such a way that the pupils themselves may be guided to find out the most important relations between the letters and their sound-values. Here they for the first time have something to do with the accents and the cedilla, whose name they learn.[51]

In the following lessons the comparison between spelling and sound is conducted in the same manner as indicated above for grammatical observations; sometimes starting from a certain sound, the students may point out all the words in which it occurs on a page or so; sometimes starting from the orthography, they may note and classify all the phonetical values of a certain letter. A few lessons will be sufficient for these preliminaries.

Ought the teacher to require the pupils to learn the orthography from the very beginning, that is, ought he to examine them in spelling or let them write dictation? No--that is not generally the practice according to the non-phonetical method either. First let them become accustomed to seeing the spelling, and in the exercises just suggested let them copy out of the book; later on they may be required to learn how to spell the words in the first line of every lesson, and in the course of a few months the pupils will be just as much at home in their French and German orthography as any pedant could require--and much more at home than they generally are now after a long time.[52]

Phonetical transcription ought by no means to be given up on beginning with the orthography: it is too good an aid to be dispensed with at this point. Not only ought whole pieces to be read, occasionally at least, in phonetical transcription, but it ought to be used in connection with all new words (thus especially in the glossary) in order to prevent all guesswork. Thereby is also obtained another important result at a later stage, namely, the teacher may be _just as strict in requiring the pronunciation to be learned as the meaning_, whereas without phonetical transcription he cannot expect the pronunciation to be prepared at home. By steadily keeping up their practice in transposing phonetical transcription into practical pronunciation the pupils have something of value for their whole life, for, when they no longer have a teacher to ask about the pronunciation of a new word, they can obtain information about it themselves. That which was only a few years ago a possibility reserved for the distant future, namely, that all French and English dictionaries should give the pronunciation according to rational principles, is now, as we know, well under way to become a reality at any time.[53]

The use of phonetics and phonetical transcription in the teaching of modern languages must be considered as one of the most important advances in modern pedagogy, because it ensures both considerable facilitation and an exceedingly large gain in exactness. But these means must be employed immediately from the very beginning; just as easy as it is to get a good pronunciation in this way, just as difficult is it to root out the bad habits which may become inveterate during a very short period of instruction according to a wrong or antiquated method. Timotheus, an old well-known music-teacher, used to demand double payment of all those pupils who had taken instruction with other teachers before they came to him; the reason that he gave was that he had much more trouble in teaching these pupils than those who had not already acquired bad habits for him to break them of. Go ye and do likewise, ye teachers of languages!

I shall add a few words on the use of the phonograph. The apparatus has been very much perfected of late years and renders beautifully most vowels and all the general features of stress, intonation, etc. But the rendering of most consonants is still far from perfect; you cannot always tell whether you hear a _p_ or an _f_, etc., and it is impossible to rely on a phonographic record for minute shades of _s_-sounds and the like. It is clear, too, that even if the apparatus were nearer the ideal than it is now, it could not replace the teacher. But in the hands of an able teacher I have no doubt that it will prove a valuable help: it is patient and will repeat the same sentences scores of times, if required, without tiring or changing a single sound or intonation; you may also have different records of the same short piece as pronounced by one man from Berlin, another man from Hanover, a third from Munich, and a fourth from Vienna, which may be very useful for comparisons, even if, as a matter of course, in your ordinary teaching you stick to one particular standard of pronunciation--and in various other ways phonographic records may be used to stimulate the pupils. But everything they hear in this way should at the same time be presented to them in phonetic writing--either in their readers or on the blackboard. Perhaps, at some future day, the “telegraphone” invented by my countryman V. Poulsen will supplant Edison’s phonograph in this as well as in other respects.

FOOTNOTES:

[38] Greek could just as well be read with Latin letters, for they are almost as much like the letters which Demosthenes used as the late black-letters are which we print as Greek.

[39] A dot after the letter and above the line is the best indication of length. _a_ is here taken phonetically, the vowel in _arm_.

[40] A hand-mirror is a useful thing to have in these preliminary phonetical exercises. In several places, the teacher requires each pupil to bring his own along.

[41] Here also the experiment in hearing the voice distinctly by holding the hands flat against the ears.

[42] I have often also conducted the exercise in such a way that the class had to voice the sound when I raised my hand, and unvoice it when I lowered my hand; thus I have made them articulate fffvvvffvvvff, ssszzsss, etc., without any pauses.

[43] That I am not exaggerating (as people certainly will suspect in about ten years from now), I could easily prove by means of a long series of opinions from pedagogical meetings, articles in pedagogical periodicals, newspaper reviews, etc.

[44] I have sometimes made the introduction longer, sometimes shorter than here indicated; some teachers make it more complete, so that they get a whole system of sounds tabulated before they pass on to the reading.

[45] But stopped consonants, like _p_, _t_, _k_, are exceptions to these instructions to isolate the sounds--every phonetician knows the reason why. They should be uttered with a vowel before and one after, e.g. _ata_.

[46] With the exception of the vowels [a·] in _alms_, [ɔ·] in _war_, and [ə·] in _sir_.

[47] This method of procedure follows in the main the suggestions of Klinghardt.

[48] If the teacher does not care to prepare such charts himself, he can use Viëtor’s Lauttafeln.

[49] Besides, the different systems of modern phoneticians all resemble each other very much--far more than did the earlier arbitrary methods of designating the pronunciation (for instance, Walker’s, Flügel’s, Toussaint-Langenscheidt’s, Tanger’s, etc.). Any one who has learned Sweet’s phonetical transcription can easily read Passy’s or my own, and vice versâ; the differences are hardly worth speaking of.

[50] I remember a lady’s dismay when a Frenchman used the combination [stane] in a sentence; she could not understand the sentence until I repeated it, inserting [sɛtane]. “O well,” she rejoined, “if he had only said [sɛtane]; we always said it that way in school.” (_Cette année._)

[51] The use of the French or German names of the letters of the alphabet when words are being spelled in English is merely affectation, and deserves only a shrug of the shoulders, especially since, as a rule, it is not consistently carried through, but is applied only to some few letters, _y_ being called [igræk] or _ypsilon_, _ch_, [seaʃ] or [tseha], according to circumstances, and this in the midst of other letters which are allowed to retain their English names with diphthongs and everything. It is quite a different thing when the teaching is wholly conducted in the foreign language; then it is necessary to practise the foreign names of the letters, but then it must be carried through consistently.

[52] Wer jemals in der schule die lautschrift als hilfsmittel zur erzielung einer besseren aussprache benutzt hat, der weiss, welcher nutzen aus ihr entspringt; der weiss aber auch, dass der schaden, welchen sie bezüglich der orthographie anrichten kann, sich nur auf wenige wochen erstreckt und äusserst gering ist, _jedenfalls viel geringer als der schaden, welchen eine schlechte aussprache in der orthographie anrichtet_. H. P. Junker, _Die neueren sprachen_, v. 99.

[53] See especially Murray, Bradley, and Craigie’s _New English Dictionary_, A. Schröer’s edition of Grieb’s _Englisch-deutsches wörterbuch_, and Rangel-Nielsen’s _Fransk-danske ordbog_. I am myself transcribing the English words in Brynildsen’s _Engelsk-dansk-norske ordbog_, two-thirds of which have already appeared. Edgren’s French Dictionary should perhaps also be mentioned, but I have never seen it myself.

XI

Like most works on pedagogy, this one too has been mostly concerned with the teaching of beginners. But now and then there has been a word about the instruction of advanced pupils, and now I shall add a few more suggestions about it. It is best to continue on the same lines as during the first years, only making those changes which circumstances necessarily demand.

The pupils must _read_--read more and more, read better and better books, books whose contents are of a nature to hold their attention and to give them as much all round information and development as possible--accordingly, as has been previously suggested, not solely works of literature. That sort of reading is especially good which gives the pupils some insight into the foreign nation’s peculiarity in the widest sense of the word, and best of all is that reading which is apt to make the pupils love what is best in the foreign people. Tennyson is right when he says, “It is the authors, more than the diplomats, who make nations love one another”;[54] and teachers of modern languages should ever remember that it is their mission to make their countrymen know and understand foreign nations. By making their pupils read good literature as well as by capacitating the younger generations of different countries for intelligent intercourse with one another, language-teachers all over the world may ultimately prove more efficacious in establishing good permanent relations between the nations than Peace Congresses at the Hague.

Some reading must be taken thoroughly, some may be _cursory_; it is perhaps best to have several gradations. Whereas in the beginning it is necessary to chew well in order to get all the linguistic nourishment out of the reading, later on it may of course be taken in larger and larger bites. Already rather early in the course of instruction, those pieces may be more lightly passed over whose contents are scarcely fit to be taken too seriously or which contain words which it is not absolutely necessary to remember. The teacher may simply let the pupils read such pieces aloud, explaining every word which they do not understand, but without basing any questions on them, and without requiring them to be studied for the next time. Later on, in the midst of more serious work, a month or two may be taken for reading a light novel through in the same easy manner. The pupils may also have private reading to do at home in addition to what they read in school. The teacher that I had in French and English in the upper classes in Frederiksborg School (H. Mathiesen) had an excellent way of making us desire of our own accord to read novels in the language studied; each one of us was ambitious to give in the longest list of volumes read when the teacher called for the lists at the first lesson in every month, and even if we of course read very rapidly and never looked up any words, yet we learned a good deal, and I consider the habit of reading which I thus acquired to be one of the most valuable acquisitions that I got during my last years in school. In order to test whether we really had read the books as stated, our teacher sometimes talked to us about their contents, but he talked in Danish, sometimes he only made us open the books at random and translate a little piece. It is no doubt better to organize this practice, as it is now done in some parts of Germany, where the whole class reads the same book at home and must have read a certain amount by a certain day (after a fortnight’s or a month’s interval). Then they must be able to give an account of the contents in the foreign language, must also ask each other questions about the book, and may even occasionally be required to write down the contents as a written exercise; after the teacher has looked through these accounts, the pupils may deliver them orally and more freely, and this will give occasion for further conversation--all in the foreign language.

Most important, however, is the reading which is done _thoroughly_, so thoroughly that the pupils completely master both contents and language, and which therefore in both these respects ought to be as good as possible. In exercises with questions and answers, the contents naturally play an important part, and even if the pupils feel it is one aim, and a very important one, to acquire skill in the language, yet this aim is not always directly kept in view as such; neither does a child talk in order to practise using its mother-tongue, but in order to get some information and in order to communicate itself to others--and thereby it learns the language. This feeling of reality becomes more and more prominent as the pupils become more advanced; in the conversations, the pupils show directly, that they understand the contents, indirectly that they understand the language.

The pupils must _talk_--about what they have read, and that the talks are not mere farces with conventional “parleur” phrases, as our opponents would like to make out, I hope that I have shown sufficiently well.[55] When a certain teacher wrote somewhere that all the conversation that there is time for consists of the following five questions, which are asked of the monitor (and only of him) at the beginning of every lesson: “Who is the monitor? What date is it to-day? What day of the week is it? Who is absent? What have you prepared for to-day?”, and that he owes it to the truth to confess that it is only the minority of the pupils who at the end of the year are able to answer these questions correctly without hesitation, then this deplorable result is primarily due to the fewness of the questions; he who only gets the tip of his finger dipped in the water three times in twenty weeks will never learn how to swim. It is secondarily due to the fact that the questions are stereotyped and have no connection with what the class is reading. Furthermore this same teacher says that he generally cannot spend more than a few minutes of each lesson on these “elementary exercises,” since the reading, translation and grammar requires the rest of the time, in the middle classes, indeed, all the time, so that at this stage there is no time at all for any conversation. But if the talks are used for interpreting the text, two big birds are killed with one stone, and then it will soon be seen that skill in speaking increases like wealth; if you have only reached a certain point, the rest comes of its own accord; the accumulated capital multiplies surprisingly fast and willingly.

The pupils must _write_--original papers in the foreign language, not translations--that is, the form of language used must be as little as possible suggested by English turns of expression. But the subject must be concrete and limited. The chief danger that there may be in such original written exercises, namely that the pupils avoid all the difficulties and only use a slender supply of expressions, which they feel sure of, this danger is greater the vaguer or more comprehensive the subject is. For instance, it is best not to give broad literary subjects, such as “Die romantische schule,” etc. A more limited subject is far better, both as an exercise and as a test; for instance, an account of a little anecdote or of the newspaper report of some event, which the teacher has read to the class; a description of what is to be seen on a picture, a renarration of some episode in the novel or in the historical selection which is being read in class, possibly in the form of a letter;[56] a summing up of everything relating to one of the characters in the text read; a review of the line of thought in (a section of) some essay which has been read; a paraphrase of some poem. Still more limited are such exercises in which a certain number of questions have to be answered, or such exercises in the use of synonymous words and expressions as have been described on p. 139.

* * * * *

But can such a method of instruction as has here been described really be carried out under existing circumstances? Are there not obstacles to be encountered on every hand? Yes; unfortunately there are things which stand in the way and make a good deal of trouble, but luckily they do not make it quite impossible for the new system to be used. As hindrances may be mentioned the shortness of the time, the apportionment of the time, the examinations, the teachers.

The _time_ which is now set apart for modern languages is too brief. Therefore all teachers of modern languages ought to unite, and, together with all the parents who are dissatisfied with the arrangements in our grammar schools (and they are not few), they ought to agitate for the removal of that burden which weighs heavily on the school and which prevents the growing generation from getting an education which can meet the urgent demands of our times, I mean, the school must be delivered from the classical languages; then there will be air and space for all that is now shoved into the background, among other things the modern foreign languages.[57] But--even in the scanty time which is now at disposal, there is much that can be done differently and better than hitherto, and the more the teachers in modern languages show this, and the more they can keep out of the old jogtrot way, the more will their subject be respected, and the more willingness will there be to extend the time when future reforms demand it.

The _apportionment_ of the time is poor. When will people finally realize that everything cannot be learned at once? Many subjects, and with so few hours a week for each that the pupils forget what they have learned from one lesson to the next--that is a frightful waste of time.

No, learn a few things or one thing at a time, learn everything well and learn it to the end before passing on to the next.[58] And especially with respect to languages, there can be no doubt that it is best to take them up one after the other, not side by side; to every language that is taken up should be devoted many hours a week, and as a rule two years ought to be allowed to pass before commencing a new language; then the first is so firmly rooted in the minds of the pupils that merely a very few lessons a week will be sufficient for keeping it up and extending it,[59] and then the two languages do not injure each other nearly as much as if they were studied side by side before the pupils have mastered either one of them. As to the question at what age the children ought to begin to learn foreign languages, I dare not express any decided opinion; I think I should be afraid to begin too early rather than too late; first let the mother tongue have time enough to take a firm and lasting hold of the child’s mind before other languages are admitted.

The worst canker in our school-system[60] is the _examinations_. Everything is arranged with a view to examinations; the parents, the children, and unfortunately also a number of the teachers care for nothing but the results attained in the examinations; the daily instruction is left to shift for itself, but the authorities will take ample care to guard against the least bit of negligence which might be shown by the examiners.

Examinations compel the teachers to lay undue stress on cramming. “Cram may be defined as the accumulation of undigested facts and second-hand theories to be reproduced on paper, handed in to the examiner, and then forgotten for ever. A crammed examinee differs from a crammed Strasburg goose in not assimilating his nutriment, and this would be a real advantage were it not that the process leaves him with a nauseated appetite, enfeebled reasoning powers, though abnormally enlarged memory, and a general distaste for disinterested study.”[61]

Examinations cause the mental and physical ruin of many more young men than we can afford. As a test of what a young man is worth in life, an examination is without any value whatever; as a test of how much really valuable knowledge he has, it is not worth much; and even as a test of how much he knows of what happens to be asked him on such an occasion, an examination is not nearly as reliable as people like to imagine.[62] And then examinations tend in so many ways to impede instruction which would otherwise be really profitable. The question “will that be required for the examination?” is always, either consciously or unconsciously, present in the schoolroom; it smothers the teacher’s enthusiasm for communicating to his pupils what interests himself most; and it discourages the pupils’ natural thirst for knowledge for its own sake. Just before the examinations, the whole school is seized with its yearly attack of its chronic examination-catarrh. In all departments, it is considered necessary to recapitulate for examinations; for a couple of months, the pupils are transformed into mental ruminants; they receive no new mental sustenance whatever, but have to be satisfied with going through the whole year’s work once or twice more at as rapid a pace as possible. The matter which they have been given does not become more savoury on being served again; all the juice and strength, all that makes it tempting is lost, and nothing remains but what is toughest and dryest.

But even if there is much fault to be found with the system of examinations, yet it is not necessary to reform that before we can begin to improve the instruction. The examination requirements are not so great that we cannot meet them even if we do not from the very beginning plan all our instruction exactly with them in view. Although the chief stress in the examination may be laid on the translation and not on speaking, yet that is no reason why the latter should be entirely dispensed with. If by a _receptive_ command of a foreign language is meant the ability to understand it, and by a _productive_ command, the power to express oneself in the language, then I am fully convinced that anyone who merely concerns himself with the receptive side of it injures himself and acquires far less ability to understand it than if he had from the very beginning also aimed at a productive command of the language. Therefore our all round exercises will give our pupils at least just as much receptive knowledge of the language as is attained by the pupils of others; and even if it is rather provoking for a teacher who has taken a good deal of trouble to teach his pupils to speak to see that this counts for little or nothing at the examination, he can comfort himself with a good conscience at any rate--beside the pleasure which he and his pupils have had in their daily work together.

Nor ought any consideration for examinations to prevent anyone from the best kind of recapitulation, which is, not to wait until the approach of examinations, when much that has been read is forgotten, so that the teacher has to be on the lookout all the time to make sure that the pupils understand everything, but to take it up while the matter is still fresh in the memory, so that it is not necessary to sound the pupils on every little point. Every chapter ought to be revised when it is finished, and every section or book ought to be gone over as a whole. Then the thoughts which were formerly occupied with details may be turned to the connected whole, and since the work can be conducted in the form of almost uninterrupted intelligent reading aloud, the pupils will be enabled to get approximately the same impression and the same enjoyment out of the matter read as a native gets.[63] If the reading has thus been gone over a section at a time at each natural break, it will be seen at the examination that these short revisions distributed throughout the year are more advantageous than a long, tedious recapitulation just before the examination, and besides the pupils have been kept fresh by reading something new up to the very end.

As the last possible impediment in the way of the reform method, I mentioned the _teachers_. Those times are now past when it was considered sufficient for a teacher of modern languages to have taken a degree in law or theology--to have studied Tacitus and Plato, and then by way of amusement to have read by himself a few volumes of _Revue des deux mondes_ or some novels by Cherbuliez and Freytag. But even the younger generation of teachers who are better prepared will very often find that it is not so very easy to give good instruction in modern languages. It is a shame how little is done to give high-school teachers opportunities for further improvement; they ought to have abundant access to courses in advanced work, but especially to many and liberal travelling scholarships, so that no conscientious teacher in foreign languages need do without a tolerably long stay among the people whose language he (she) teaches. Poor pay and long hours, too, naturally lead to a teacher’s looking merely to examination results.

But still I continue to hope that more and more teachers will avoid the old rut, and they will surely find that it pays to get out of it, even if, especially in the beginning, they have to expend more time and energy on their teaching, and on their preparation for every lesson, in order to meet the greater demands of the new methods. In Germany and the Scandinavian countries, exceedingly great efforts are being made to reform the instruction in languages; in Norway, much of what has been recommended in this book has even been adopted in the official school-plans issued in 1897;[64] and fortunately the movement is also on the way to becoming strong in England. If this book by a foreigner can contribute ever so little to the encouragement and support of English language-teachers in their zealous and able efforts to introduce newer and better methods, then I am glad to have been enabled in this manner to pay off a little of the debt that I owe to England and to many Englishmen.

In closing let me try to sum up. The old-fashioned disconnected sentences proved to be a failure for many reasons, and one reason was because there was nothing else to do with them but to translate them. They could arouse no interest; they could not even be read aloud intelligently; they could not be remembered in that definite form which they happened to have, so they could not be used as patterns for the construction of other sentences; therefore the rules of the grammar, which was committed to memory, came to play such an important part. It all became monotonous and lifeless.