Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/240

226 adjective, an adverb, and a preposition. One pupil goes behind the door, and each of the others must compose a sentence in which the given word is employed. The one who hides must guess it.

All these exercises—the writing of sentences on given words, versification, and the guessing of words—have one single aim: to persuade the pupil that a word is a word, having its unalterable laws, modifications, endings, and mutual relations; now this conviction is slow to enter their minds, and it must assuredly precede the study of grammar.

All these exercises please; all exercises in grammar produce ennui. Stranger and more significant than anything else is the fact that grammar is a bore, though nothing is easier. As soon as you cease to teach it by a book, a six-year-old child, beginning with definitions, will be able in half an hour to decline, to conjugate, to recognize genders, numbers, tenses, subjects, and predicates, and you feel that he knows all this just as well as you do.

In the dialect of our region there is no neuter gender: gun, hay, meat, window—everything is she, and in this respect grammar is of no avail.

The older pupils for three years have known all the rules of declension and the case-endings, and yet, in writing a short sentence, they will make several mistakes, and in spite of your corrections and all the reading they do, they will use a wrong word over and over again.

But you ask yourself: Why teach them when they know all this as well as you do? If I ask what is the genitive plural feminine of bolshoï, "great"; if I ask where the subject or the predicate is; if I ask from what stem comes the word raspakhnulsa, —it is only the nomenclature that is difficult for him, but the adjective in whatever number and case you wish he will always use without mistake. Consequently, he knows the declension. Never in speaking will he neglect to employ the predicate, and he will not confuse the complement with it.