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How to Teach a Foreign Language. Otto Jespersen
Читать онлайн.Название How to Teach a Foreign Language
Год выпуска 0
isbn 4064066247751
Автор произведения Otto Jespersen
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Bookwire
It is grammar that plays the chief rôle. A characteristic teacher’s report is: “In the course of the school-year we have gone through accidence as far as the third class of verbs.” The raison d’être of each sentence lies merely in its value for the grammatical exercises, so that by reading schoolbooks one often gets the impression that Frenchmen must be strictly systematical beings, who one day speak merely in futures, another day in passé définis, and who say the most disconnected things only for the sake of being able to use all the persons in the tense which for the time being happens to be the subject for conversation, while they carefully postpone the use of the subjunctive until next year.
Now, as misfortune will have it, although the whole system is planned for drilling in grammar, this end is by no means attained by these too systematical exercises. The pupils get the scent of what is to be used in a certain exercise, and they use it mechanically there, but they do not learn how to transfer it to other connexions, so if they suddenly have to use a future in an exercise on the pluperfect the future form is apt to bear a suspicious resemblance to the pluperfect form; when the pupils are being drilled in the endings of the fourth declension, and a word belonging to the third declension happens to have crept in, it is very difficult to get it correctly declined without any reminiscence of fourth-class endings, etc. I once read a pedagogical article by a German schoolmaster, I think it was, who had discovered that the reason why there were so many poor Latin exercises written was that the pupils often had to apply several rules of syntax in one and the same sentence; if the sentences were only so made that each one of them contained but one grammatical phenomenon, it would soon be seen how clever the pupils could be. Yes, how pleasant it would be if life too could be so arranged as to have the difficulties come one at a time.
As previously remarked, there is too little attention paid to what is idiomatical, and sentences constructed by non-natives are apt to be of the kind that never would occur to a native, even if it may be difficult enough to find positive “mistakes” in them. Many of the French and German sentences in our schoolbooks must surely have the same air of unreality for a native as not a few of those found in English primers published abroad have for an Englishman.
Very closely connected with the idiomatical elements of a language are its characteristics of style, and in this respect too our schoolbooks are clumsy enough, for words which belong merely to elevated or specially poetical style are bundled together with every-day words in the very beginning of the first primer without any caution to the pupil against using them. A foreigner who wants to learn English has first of all use for words like “grief, sorrow,” but he had better postpone acquaintance with “woe,” otherwise he is as likely as not to make himself ridiculous by saying “it was a great woe to me.” “Unwilling” is more necessary than “loth,” “wash” than “lave,” “lonely” or “forsaken” than “forlorn,” etc. But on one of the very first pages of Listov’s English Reader which is written for beginners, we find “I bid him go,” which is altogether old-fashioned, stiff and bookish (for: I told him to go, I asked him to go, or I ordered ...), and in the same book “foe” is preferred to the ordinary, indispensable “enemy.” And in several English primers the unnatural “commence” is used all the way through instead of the natural “begin”; likewise the rare “purchase” for the everyday “buy”—the only reason which I can think of is that the ordinary, indispensable words follow irregular declensions and inflexions.
The beginner has only use for the most everyday words; he ought to have nothing to do with the vocabulary of poetry or even of more elevated prose; like everything superfluous, it is detrimental, because it burdens the memory and hinders perfect familiarity with that which is most necessary. It will, moreover, be impossible for him to get a proper conception of the linguistic effectiveness of poetry and elevated prose, when he is so far advanced as to read the good writers, because from his very first lesson in the language he has learned the literary expressions side by side with the phrases of normal prose and everyday conversation. But even among words not belonging to the language of literature, many may without scruple be postponed in order to make room for the most necessary words, which must be learned in such a manner that one always may have them on hand without the slightest hesitation. In Miss Goldschmidt’s picture-method (which is now used a good deal outside of its native land, Denmark, and also in large part deserves the popularity and praise which it has won), I find, for instance, not less than 58 words for that many more or less intimate articles of women’s clothing; and when I in the same book under the heading “cuisine” find 46 words, among others, “bouilloire tamis, passoire, pelle à main, puisoire, lavette, canelle évier, coquetier, écumoire, entonnoir, pilon, râtelier, râpe, billot, manne,” I cannot help feeling thankful that no one ever tormented me with learning them; it seems to me I have got along pretty well in Paris and elsewhere in French conversations, just as I have read many French books, without knowing all these technical words. But, on the other hand, I have a strong notion that I should not have got along so well in conversation, and should not have been able to read French so well, if my vocabulary had been limited to the one in Miss Goldschmidt’s pictures.
The usual treatment of grammar, too, involves the learning of a number of words that one has no use for. There are few words which even the stupidest pupils in French and English have so pat as “louse,” and the reason is that the plural of both “pou” and “louse” happens to be something out of the ordinary. For as soon as a word is declined differently from the usual paradigms, it has to be learned for the sake of so-called completeness. Thus we had to learn in school the rigmarole: “amussis, ravis, sitis, tussis, vis” and usually also “febris, pelvis, puppis, restis, turris, securis,” where “vis vim” (perhaps also “sitis sitim”) would have sufficed; the others (with meanings like ruler, hoarseness, rope), I am sure, never occurred in what we read of Latin literature, and as far as the last words are concerned, why it would not have made any difference anyway if we had let the accusative end in “—em,” if we had to use the word in a catch exercise. And then there was the “long rigmarole” which it was our pride to be able to run through without winking: “amnis, axis,” etc., and which doubtless has cost us all some hours of drudgery before we could quite make it stick. Of the words in it, “scrobis, sentis, torris, vectis,” at least, were entirely superfluous for us—aside from the fact that if by some wonderful chance we should come across one of the words in the course of our reading, we were sure enough to remember that the word stood in the long rigmarole, but why it stood there or what the word meant, that was apt to be quite forgotten. Well, it did not make much difference in so far as the chances were a thousand to one that for understanding the passage in question it was absolutely of no consequence if we had remembered that the word was masculine. (It may be of some comfort to add that some of them may also be feminine: the old Romans were not always as big pedants as Latin teachers would like to make them out to be.) Sweet writes: “In the German grammar I began with the word Hornung, ‘February,’ was given as an exception to the rule that nouns in -ung are feminine, and for many years no German word was more familiar to me, except perhaps petschaft, ‘seal,’ whose acquaintance I made at the same time and in the same way. But to the present