Page:The life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (IA b21778401).pdf/86

56 learn more Greek and Latin in one year at Bonn and Heidelberg than in three at Oxford. The college teaching, for which one was obliged to pay, was of the most worthless description. Two hours a day were regularly wasted, and those who read for honours were obliged to choose and to pay for a private coach. Amongst the said coaches were some drôles, who taught in very peculiar ways, by Rhymes, not always of the most delicate description. One celebrated coach, after lecturing his blockheads upon the subject, we will say, of Salmanizer, would say to them, "Now, you fellows, you'll forget in a day everything that I've been teaching you for the last hour. Whenever you hear this man's name, just repeat to yourselves * * * * * and you'll remember all about it."

The worst of such teaching was, that it had no order and no system. Its philology was ridiculous, and it did nothing to work the reasoning powers. Learning foreign languages, as a child learns its own, is mostly a work of pure memory, which acquires, after childhood, every artificial assistance possible. My system of learning a language in two months was purely my own invention, and thoroughly suited myself. I got a simple grammar and vocabulary, marked out the forms and words which I knew were absolutely necessary, and learnt them by heart by carrying them in my pocket and looking over them at spare moments during the day. I never worked more than a quarter of an hour at a time, for after that the brain lost its freshness. After leaning some three hundred words, easily done in a week, I stumbled through some easy book-work (one of the Gospels is the most come-atable), and underlined every word that I wished to recollect, in order to read over my pencillings at least once a day. Having finished my volume, I then carefully worked up the grammar minutiæ, and I then chose some other book whose subject most inerested me. The neck of the language was now broken, and progress was rapid. If I came across a new sound like the Arabic Ghayn, I trained my tongue to it by repeating it so many thousand times a day. When I read, I invariably read out loud, so that the ear might aid memory. I was delighted with the most difficult characters, Chinese and Cuneiform, because I felt that they impressed themselves more strongly upon the eye than the eternal Roman letters. This, by-and-by, made me resolutely stand aloof from the hundred schemes for transliterating Eastern languages, such as Arabic, Sanscrit, Hebrew, and Syriac, into Latin letters, and whenever I conversed with anybody in a language that I was learning, I took the trouble to repeat their words inaudibly after them, and so to learn the trick of pronunciation and emphasis.