Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/340

326 It plays the same part as the language of action in the mother-tongue. In thus conforming to the law of Nature, by which we pass from the whole to its parts, this process saves the student from uncertainty and ennui in the understanding of authors, and he will naturally use it in reading outside of his lessons. The promptitude with which the pupil, by this method, seizes the thought of the author, gives an interest to the reading which cannot be attained when the attention is arrested on each word, and all connection of ideas destroyed by the use of a dictionary. Besides, in this way the pupil reads more in a given time, the same expressions recur oftener, and so are engraved upon the memory. Progress in reading is in inverse ratio to the time taken. For example, 100 pages translated at the rate of ten pages a day advances the student more in the art of reading than the same 100 pages read at the rate of one page a day.

My first reading-books of English are formed on this plan. Composed of anecdotes and familiar recitals that pique the curiosity, they are, so to speak, practical vocabularies, of which all the words have a determined meaning; they address the understanding as well as the memory. The reading again and again of the same passages impresses the words, with their terminations, upon the mind with more certainty than the mechanical learning by heart in grammars, vocabularies, and phrase-books, of the current methods.

Led by the interest of the subject, each sentence awakens a desire to understand the next, and to pursue the reading, while nothing is more fatiguing and discouraging than the work of reading disconnected phrases. The student will have only to read a few volumes with the translation on the opposite page, before he can translate good authors without this auxiliary. After this, the sense of the new words he encounters will be easily discovered from the context, or by the aid of the dictionary, and he will soon read the authors directly. From this moment he will progress in all the other parts of the study.

To free himself entirely from the translation, the student must read the same passages many times: he then seizes the sense more rapidly, and ideas associate themselves naturally with words. He must, above all, read the entire work. In proportion as he advances in reading a book, it becomes easier, while the same subject, the same style, remaining longer under the attention, the phraseology of the author will be more profoundly impressed on the mind, and will be more closely linked to the thought. The stories of which the first books of this method are composed belong to common language, and contain the words and phrases ordinarily employed, so that they familiarize the student with the most useful elements of conversation and correspondence.

The facility with which a pupil reads and the rapidity of his progress permit him to read more in three months than in three years by other methods. Those who object to this facility of work,