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,
(3) contain the most necessary material of the language first, especially the material of everyday language,
(4) be correct French (German, etc.),
(5) pass gradually from that which is easy to that which is more difficult,
(6) yet without too much consideration for what is merely grammatically easy or difficult.
This order does not indicate the relative importance or value of the requirements, which might be difficult to determine. If there should be any disagreement between them, I suppose it is generally best to try to find some practical compromise. We must now pass on to examine some of these requirements more closely.
The use of connected texts in the elementary teaching of languages has already previously been tried, but it seems as if in the effort to avoid the Scylla of disconnected sentences it has been impossible to escape the Charybdis of such texts as Chateaubriand’s Atala, Dickens’ Christmas Carol (Méthode Toussaint-Langenscheidt), the New Testament, or Cæsar’s Gallic War, etc. How often after such experiments, when the pupil was overwhelmed and did not learn anything because he was to learn everything at once, has not the teacher returned in despair to the disconnected sentences.
But between the two extremes there is no doubt room for the golden mean of beginning with quite short connected pieces, and then gradually, as each lesson may be lengthened, passing over to longer texts—of course this does not necessarily mean that a whole piece must always be taken for each lesson; the breaks in the lessons do not need to correspond to the breaks in the text-book.
Anecdotes meet the requirements in so far as they are short connected pieces, and therefore they play such an important part in many readers. But yet they are not quite the thing, especially when they are used in too great numbers. A pointed anecdote can only be really funny once; if it is to be repeated many times, it soon becomes stale and indeed more tiresome than most other things. And just the very quality which makes it amusing makes it less valuable for teaching purposes; that is, an anecdote must by its very nature contain as few words as possible; but it is better for beginners to get a little broader colouring, so that the most necessary words and phrases may recur frequently. If many anecdotes follow one upon the other, it is not easy to avoid frequent jumps between totally different spheres of thought and accordingly between totally different worlds of words; this increases the difficulty, and the result is apt to be that words and expressions once learned are soon forgotten. Anecdotes depending upon puns cannot be appreciated at all without full familiarity with the words resembling each other, and that can only in a minority of cases be assumed for our pupils. The best way to use anecdotes in teaching languages is to let them serve as spice in or in connection with other pieces, especially descriptive pieces, so that the words used in the anecdotes may there appear in their natural surroundings. This can best be done in short stories about animals; in my own books for beginners in English, I have taken several such pieces from purely scientific works by Sir John Lubbock, Romanes, Tylor, etc. I mention these as examples of a kind of texts which seem to me to be especially attractive (but which are neither so easy to get hold of nor to concoct), because they give entertaining and sensible information about things which are often neglected in the natural science instruction itself, and at the same time they give an opportunity of learning a good deal of useful language-material without being too difficult. The pieces which are merely descriptive of nature, and which Sweet lays so much stress upon, have the advantage that they in a still greater degree allow of the employment of the most indispensable material of language, and that a number of the sentences may be made self-explanatory (v. below). There are, however, but relatively few subjects that can be dealt with in this way—the most elementary natural phenomena—and when they are not written in such a masterly manner as in Sweet’s Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Englisch, there are apt to be so many well-known truths told in these pieces that the interest flags.
In deciding on what will be of interest as a selection for reading, differences in age must of course to a great extent be taken into consideration. But it is an experience which I myself have had, and in which many teachers bear me out, that beginners in a foreign language may very well be interested in certain reading matter even if they are beyond the age when corresponding things would interest them in their native language. So one must not be afraid of childish texts; but by this I do not mean to recommend a certain kind of juvenile literature which flourishes in all countries, and which aunts, especially the unmarried ones, often think that children appreciate, and so they themselves also proceed to produce it in large quantities, that is, milk-and-water stories and verses about the reward of good children and the frightful punishment of the naughty ones; both young and old find such “literature” nauseating, and it were best to avoid it in text-books in foreign languages. But there is another class of literature, that collected by folklorists, which is orally transmitted from generation to generation, and which shows its vigour by being continually amusing and by continually shooting new shoots. Much of it can successfully be used in teaching languages; and that which amuses a French child of five or six years may often amuse an English child of ten or eleven or even more, because in the foreign language it gets the charm that always is connected with the unknown.
Much of this material—and of other material, which, without belonging to popular tradition, is
