which has the great advantage for our purpose, that rhythm and rhyme naturally rivet the words and expressions fast to each other, so that the memory gets hold of them like an unbreakable chain. It is only with great difficulty and with much repetition that prose sentences can be inculcated in a certain given form; but to learn verse is like play—it learns itself. If therefore the poetry of art, with its more or less unnatural language, is unsuitable for the beginner, the little witty natural verses of the genuine children’s literature are, on the other hand, excellent. But of course not even these are always pure pearls, and there are many of them to be rejected as containing impertinences, nonsense-words, fragments of antiquated language, or words which beginners have no use for; it seems to me, for instance, that Viëtor and Dörr should not have transferred the nursery rhymes wholesale (even the old forms with —th in the third person, and much more) into their otherwise excellent English reader.
With respect to the requirement that the reading must be easy—or rather that there must be gradual progress from easy to difficult—it must be recognized that difficulty may depend upon several different things.
In the first place, the subject-matter may be too difficult; it ought never to be beyond the horizon of the pupils. As previously remarked, in the very beginning, one may even take something simpler than what would otherwise be suitable for persons of that age. But later, on the other hand, the subject-matter ought not to be too light; it is well, as soon as possible, to use matter which really has a permanent value of its own. A large part of the reading will no doubt always be taken from lighter literature, and most of it will not cause any real difficulty as far as the comprehension of the subject-matter is concerned. But in addition to that, there ought surely to be read to a far greater extent than has hitherto been the case in modern language instruction, matter which cannot be understood without some serious thinking, articles on natural science and on human relations in the widest sense of the word, political speeches, etc. Many teachers seem to be afraid to read anything else with their pupils than the most insignificant novel-literature whose contents furnish starvation food. A little friend of mine seven years old once said to his mother: “I like that best which I can scarcely understand.” He thereby expressed the same thought as Dante when he said that man is not happy unless he strains every nerve, or Stuart Mill in his remark: “A pupil who is never required to do what he cannot do never does what he can do.” All instruction must spur the pupil on with problems that are not too easy; in the first stage of instruction in languages, there are problems enough in the purely linguistic difficulties; later on the contents of the reading, too, ought to require some independent powers of assimilation. Sometimes it may even be best to choose selections where the language is very easy, but the matter rather weighty—especially in teaching according to the reform-method, where subject-matter is necessarily assigned a more important part than hitherto, and where even an easy text can in various ways be advantageously employed as a means of training in purely linguistic skill.
Even linguistic easiness or difficulty may depend upon different things. Difficulties in pronunciation ought not to be piled up, a caution applying especially to selections for the very first beginners. Some teachers try to begin with words which may be almost or wholly pronounced with sounds occurring in the native language of the pupils. Aside from the fact that in most cases it only leads to disappointment to exaggerate the resemblance between the foreign and native sounds, this principle may easily lead to slovenliness at a stage when it might involve the most dangerous consequences. The pupil ought from the very first lesson to have the clearest sensation of being on foreign ground, and he ought to realize that the foreign sounds cannot be learned without work. But the difficult sounds ought not to occur too many in succession or in too difficult combinations. It is perhaps best to begin with words of one syllable, but this need not be strictly carried through. I do not, however, attach so much importance to mere difficulties in pronunciation that I would advise an otherwise suitable opening selection in a French reader for beginners to be discarded because it contained such difficult words as manger and chien. It cannot be long, anyway, before the pupils must make acquaintance with, and, what is more, master all the sounds in the language they are about to learn. By difficulties in pronunciation here I mean the real ones, and not such apparent difficulties as are due to freaks of orthography; it is equally troublesome for a German to pronounce English pear and pair; such difficulties as are found in English scarce, fatigue, victuals, French eut, pupille, pitié, balbutier, etc., may be overcome by a panacea which I shall come to later, namely, phonetical transcription.
Furthermore linguistic difficulty may be due to the use of too many new words, and in this respect the best principle at all stages is: as few new words as possible. Every one who has read such pages as often occur in Zola or Daudet, where technical expressions are abundantly piled up, will have had the experience that even with the most careful reading or study it did not take long before all the new words were just as unfamiliar as before the selection was read. Likewise, when one sets to work to learn systematic vocabularies like Plötz’s Vocabulaire Systématique, it requires enormous exertion and a long time to learn them, and it takes an amazingly short time to unlearn them again. But if, in the course of one’s reading, the new words turn up occasionally at relatively large intervals, then the mind is able to absorb the one before the next appears; the intervening passages, which contain only familiar things, manure the soil, as it were, for the new things that are to be sown in it. Ten or twelve new words are more easily and more thoroughly learned when they are scattered over five pages than when they are crowded into ten lines, and then besides there is the benefit to be derived from the recurrence of a number of usual words, to say nothing of sentence-constructions, etc., so that he who has read those five pages has had more opportunity to familiarize himself with the idiosyncrasies of the foreign language than he would have had in ten lines; the apparent waste of time in reading the longer piece has really been profitable, for the capital which had already been acquired in the language has in that time borne interest and compound interest.
Now since it is also better, as we have said, to learn five absolutely necessary words than twenty-five of less importance, it is of course the duty of the editors of text-books in large part to revise the selections which they reprint, so that that which is of linguistic value for the pupils may be cultivated at the expense of everything that is unusual or odd. Texts whose subject-matter is good, but whose language makes them impossible for our purpose, may often be made pedagogically practicable by means of curtailing, paraphrasing, and adaptation in various ways; many popular fairy-tales in the collections of folklorists may be used if one only will take the trouble to translate them from the dialect in which they are written. Such a splendid little story as Mrs. Ewing’s Jackanapes, which is frequently read as it stands in German and Swedish schools, is, according to my judgment, too full of literary expressions and unnecessary words to be easily comprehended by our little pupils. In the passage which I have selected for my own primer, I have therefore in several places made considerable omissions, and the style has throughout been made more colloquial and direct, by means of corrections like these for instance: having ceased to entertain (given up) any hopes of his own recovery. | Tony tumbled off during the first revolution (before he had gone round once). | And what bright eyes peeped out of his dark forelock as it was blown by the wind! (he had!) | told him that he must be on his very best behaviour (behave properly) during the visit. If it had been feasible (possible) to leave off calling him Jackanapes and to get used to his baptismal (real Christian) name of Theodore before the day after to-morrow it would have been satisfactory (she would have done it) | said J., shaking his yellow mop (hair), and leaning back in his one of the two Chippendale armchairs in which they sat (the italicized words left out) | took their early promenade (went out for their walk) earlier than usual | His golden hair flew out, an aureole from which his cheeks shone red and distended with trumpeting (left out). It is very probable that on comparing the original with the revised text, it will be found that some of the colouring has been lost; I merely maintain that the pupils gain thereby. The more it is insisted upon (as according to the reform-method) that the selections are not only to be read but also to be mastered, so that their language becomes the mental property of the pupil, the more necessary is such revision. It is clear that as the pupil progresses,
