Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/402

 for her little letters or essays on subjects that interested me. She was then to correct my mistakes and to instruct me in the idiomatic forms of speech. In following this method we were to have a grammar at hand for the purpose of pointing out the rules which I had violated. This pleased her, and as I was already able to make myself somewhat understood in French, we set to work without delay.

This method proved very successful. My letters or short essays treated of real happenings that had occurred to me, or of what I had seen in museums, or of books, or of the political events of the day. Now, as I did not merely link together grammatically constructed sentences as the pupils of so many educational institutions usually do when writing their Latin themes, but as I set forth my experiences and my views with great freedom and thereby tried to give my exercises some intrinsic interest, my teacher did not confine herself to the mere correction of my grammatical mistakes, but she entered into animated conversations with me, in which she encouraged me further to enlarge upon the subjects narrated or discussed in my papers. These conversations, in which she showed, aside from a thorough knowledge of French, much independent thought and comprehension, became to both of us so agreeable that not seldom the passing of the hour escaped our attention, and when I rose to take leave she insisted that I stay in order to pursue the discussion a little farther. Aside from these lessons I read much and never permitted myself to skip over words or forms of speech which I did not understand. My progress was encouraging, and after a few weeks it happened sometimes that my teacher returned my paper to me with the assurance that she found nothing in it to correct.

This way of learning a foreign language proved no less effective than agreeable. One may begin the attempts of free