Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/493

Rh seeing letters, that pronunciation is made familiar, and yet exercises for the eye have the first place in our methods. It is impossible to represent unknown sounds to the eye by any combination of letters whatever, still less the diverse shades of intonation which characterize the speech of a people.

It is an error to believe, as is commonly done, that we cannot read a foreign text, in the sense we attach to this word, without pronouncing it, at least mentally. In the mother-tongue, the meaning of written words is conveyed to the mind only by the sounds that they represent, the ideas being a priori associated with the sounds. But the words of a foreign language do not recall to the student, any more than to a deaf-mute in his own language, any sound associated with-the sense. There is, then, no necessity, as there is no possibility, of pronouncing it. It is, in fact, with the written signs of a foreign language, as with all other signs—we may know their value without attaching to them a sound; the Chinese characters, for example, are understood detached from all pronunciation. The young child associates the sense with the sound of words, and has no need to think of their orthography; in the same way, the student of a foreign language should associate the sense with the orthography of words, not with their pronunciation. If, as the rational method prescribes, we always pronounce the French when following with the eye the foreign text, we protect ourselves from a false pronunciation; for it will be impossible to pronounce English at the same moment when the organs of speech are occupied in pronouncing French.

—Of all the exercises which most favor ignorance in teachers who are not duly prepared, and which inspire most ennui in students, the worst are those mnemonic exercises in which the master acts a purely passive part, and the pupil an automatic one. It is said that by such means we develop the memory of children, but for this no special effort is needed, as the culture of memory, like that of attention, is secured by the activity of the other faculties. It is more particularly in exercising the judgment that we enrich the memory with useful things. The knowledge we gather in the first years of life we owe to observation and experience—the best of masters—and it is more profoundly engraved upon the memory than all the memorized lessons of college. The mother-tongue is acquired without learning any thing by heart.

Those who, in teaching their pupils to speak a foreign language, give them words to learn, to form into phrases, commit a triple error. In the first place, the child does not learn to talk by passing from words to phrases. In the second place, in order to speak, he learns to understand what is said to him. In the third place, no mother ever attempted such a proceeding: the instinct of imitation alone suffices the child in learning to speak.

The expression of thought is not aided by learning extracts from