“But our pupils must not only know their foreign languages unconsciously and mechanically; they must not only learn how to express themselves, but they must also know why.” When I think of the instruction in grammar that has been usual hitherto, I am tempted to say as if in echo, “Why?”

In a school in Copenhagen, the story goes that a certain teacher after having asked about the gender of the French substantive mort and then “Why?” got the answer, “Because it comes from Latin mors, which is feminine”; he was not satisfied with that, however, but made the correction: “No, it is because it is an exception.” When we feel scandalized at this teacher’s stupidity, we ought conscientiously to ask ourselves if many of the answers given to the question “Why?” in grammar teaching are in reality much more valuable than this one; the object in most cases is merely to classify the sentences or words under certain given rubrics and to give their names and the respective rules which have been committed to memory, something which can in large part be done with very little real grammatical understanding of the language in question.

The usual superstition that theoretical instruction in grammar is the best way to teach pupils how to express themselves grammatically is of a piece with the severity with which grammatical mistakes are criticized in comparison with the mildness with which mistakes of vocabulary, etc., are treated.

That grammatical propositions are abstractions, which are often difficult even for experts to understand, and which must therefore be far beyond the horizon of our pupils, we see from the way in which most philologists, on coming across a rule which is the least bit involved, immediately have to resort to the examples to see what the point is; we also see it from the difficulty which grammarians often find in expressing their rules in such a way as to be really clear. Therefore there is even among persons who have to any extent studied languages theoretically (and perhaps most among them) a great tendency to avoid as much as possible the traditional, grammatical, theoretical method when they want to take up a new language; this feeling has been clearly expressed by the renowned Romance scholar H. Schuchardt.[28] It is true, as has been said, that one really cannot begin to learn the grammar of a language until one knows the language itself.

In contrast to our school-days, when in all subjects a ready-made system was pounded into us, and it was only through the system that we caught sight of some of the facts upon which it was built, so that we indulged in only extremely little of anything like independent observation or classification of observations, in contrast to all this, another method of procedure is coming to the front in all teaching, a method which starts out from the things which the child itself can see in its surroundings, a method which trains the child to observe, to classify its observations, to draw its own conclusions, so that finally, when the time is ripe, the scientific system will raise itself, as it were, in a natural way on the foundation of the observations made. The golden rule is: “Never tell the children anything that they can find out for themselves.”

Theoretical grammar ought not to be taken up too early, and when it is taken up it is not well to do it in such a way that the pupil is given ready-made paradigms and rules. After the manner of Spencer’s “Inventional Geometry,” where the pupil is all the way through led to find out the propositions and proofs for himself, we ought to get an Inventional Grammar. When a selection in the reader has been read, the pupils may be asked to go through it again (read it aloud), and pay special attention, for instance, to the personal pronouns; every time one occurs, it is to be written down on the blackboard; there the forms are finally classified (by the pupils!) according to the natural associations between them, and thus the paradigms are constructed quite naturally; then, if desired, the pupils can copy them down in special note-books for future reference. For instance, if the French possessive pronoun is found in the two forms son and sa, in the combinations sa main, son gant, son ÉpÉe, son ennemi, sa figure, sa blessure, son opinion, the object of the pupils must be to discover the principle of usage. It will not be found difficult to formulate a rule in these cases; but, if necessary, the teacher can help the pupils not a little by means of the emphasis with which he reads the sentences in which the forms are found. Then the rule once formulated may be tested on other forms to see if the same principle of usage should happen to apply there too, etc.

Of course the teacher must decide beforehand[29] what points of grammar a certain text is especially fitted to illustrate in this manner. Yet it is not necessary for all the forms which it is desired to group together to occur in the piece which is being examined; if there are any empty spaces in the paradigms, the pupils will of their own accord desire to get them filled out, and they will thus have an opportunity to learn something new. It will also frequently happen that the missing forms are already familiar to the pupils from previous reading; in that case, if the pupils themselves do not happen to think of them, the teacher can easily give them a clue by saying the beginning of the sentence in which they occur.[30]

It follows as a matter of course that only the most elementary things can be so examined in a text of one or two pages that grammatical rules or a tolerably adequate paradigm can be formulated. In dealing with beginners the teacher must not be too ambitious to get, for instance, all the forms of a verb collected in that manner, at all events not all at once; it is not necessary; one tense at a time is quite sufficient. And of course one must not be such a slave of traditional grammatical systems, that one necessarily must go all the way through one class of words before beginning another, etc. There is no reason why these bits of system should not be taken up quite unsystematically, one day a little about pronouns, another day the present tense of verbs, a third day the comparison of adjectives, etc., all according to what comes natural, or what the texts give occasion for.[31] And it will not matter if some time is allowed to pass between these exercises. One of the abominations of the old method of instruction was that the teacher, as a Swedish author has expressed it, considered it his duty on all occasions to feel the grammatical pulse of the pupils.

A teacher in English can, at a rather early stage, set to work in this way to examine and formulate the use of English do as an auxiliary verb. A rather long piece which has been read is assigned to the pupils in parts, so that A and B get the first page, C and D the next, etc., and they are to find and note down all the cases which occur. Then the cases found are gone through in the class in such a way that the teacher first requires all those sentences to be read aloud where do occurs and there is no negation. After some sentences have been read, he may ask what they have in common; if no one answers, more sentences may be taken until someone discovers that all the sentences are interrogative, and then this discovery may be tested in the following sentences. Thereupon the negative sentences which were before omitted are gone through. Is it then necessary to have do in all questions, and in all negative sentences? Well, go through the same pages again for next time and note down all the cases of interrogative and negative sentences where do does not occur. Then in the next lesson we shall finally be able to formulate the rules. This takes longer than to learn the rule in a grammar. Yes, but then we may also be certain that it will be far better understood and remembered, to say nothing of the pleasure it always gives to discover something oneself; it has all of it been a little preliminary practice in scientific methods of research and drawing of conclusions. And then—what I always return to—the whole exercise has also been a review of a number of sentences, and there is not much danger that the pupils will forget the words, turns of expression and grammatical relations which they have become intimate with in this manner.

Even if we do not attain to any results that can stand comparison with the rules in our text-books, yet such lessons in grammatical observation and systematization are none the less valuable. For instance, the last three or four days’ German lesson may be gone through with special attention given to the gender. One pupil reads aloud; every time he comes to a substantive, he mentions one of his class-mates (or the teacher motions to one of them), who is to give the gender,[32] as well as the reasons for his inference (the form of the article in in der kirche, the termination of the adjective in ein schÖnes mÄdchen, etc.); one of the boys stands at the blackboard, which is divided into three columns, and writes down each word in the right column, after its gender is determined. When the form or the context does not show the gender, the teacher asks if the word is familiar from previous passages, and if the gender could be seen there; otherwise the teacher will have to say what gender it is. At last (toward the end of the lesson, or when the blackboard is full), all the words are repeated together with the article; then, if it seems fit, the teacher may examine one or another pupil, letting him stand with his back to the blackboard. If there are, for instance, two or three words ending in ung or schaft or some other absolutely certain ending, the pupils may be asked to recall other words with the same ending, and then formulate the rule for themselves. A few hours employed in this manner will surely bear much more fruit than if all the long rules for gender with their exceptions and exceptions to exceptions were committed to memory; the attention is roused and the powers of observation are sharpened, so that the pupils will also in the future take note of the gender of new words, when there is anything to indicate it, especially since it is necessary for them to know the gender of the words which they need in the conversation and transposition exercises already described in this book.

Difficult, especially syntactical, phenomena which do not occur very frequently, cannot be treated exactly in this way, but some of them may be taken up in an analogical manner. During the going over of a large section of the French reader, the attention may, for instance, be directed to the subjunctive, so that each subjunctive form is either written down in a notebook or marked in the margin of the reader; after one or two weeks or so, all these sentences may be collected and arranged in large groups. During the next week, similar cases are frequently met with, and the pupil is given an opportunity to recall his recent observations, and perhaps supplement them by newly discovered varieties of subjunctive clauses, etc. But it must be continually borne in mind that much of what is found in grammars is really of no value except to the philological specialist, and should never be learned by schoolboys.

A systematical grammar is not superfluous except in the first stage. Later on its examples may be used to supplement those collected in the course of the reading; the teacher can, for instance, read them aloud, make sure that they are understood, and use them to help the pupils to find out the rule. Then, when the pupils have formulated the rule as well as they can, it may be read as rendered in the grammar. To go through the grammar from one end to the other, a section at a time, ought not to be undertaken until most of the phenomena have been treated in connexion with the reading; it will then be both easier and more interesting than if taken up earlier; its chief use will then be to fill out and confirm what has already been learned.[33]

If grammar is taught in this way, the pupils will not get that feeling which they now so frequently have, that they are just learning a series of arbitrarily prescribed instructions as to how they are to avoid making mistakes and getting “poor marks” in their written exercises; they are more apt to conceive of it as something to be compared to the laws of nature, those general comprehensive observations of what takes place under certain conditions; for grammar is made up of observations of the manner in which the natives express themselves. The pupils no longer say to themselves: “We must have the subjunctive in purpose clauses for it stands in § 235,” but “we find the subjunctive in all purpose clauses.” The teacher’s chief task is to give the pupils insight into the construction of the foreign language, into its peculiarities and the chief points in which it deviates from other languages. As a rule, text-books dwell too much on details, and often neglect very important features, such as for instance the great freedom allowed in English in the use of substantives as verbs and vice-versÂ, the different part played by order of words in the different languages, the cause and effect relationship between a fixed order of words and paucity of case-endings, etc.

The usual arrangement of grammatical material is not as shrewd as it might be. The sharp division between accidence and syntax as we find it in most of our text-books is, from a scientific point of view, untenable and impracticable[34]; from a pedagogical point of view it is unfortunate, because it separates form and function, which ought to be learned together, just as well as a word’s exterior (its sounds and spelling), and its meaning are learned together.[35] And within each of these two parts of the grammar, the usual order of procedure depends upon a meaningless order of precedence between the classes of words, whereby the adverbs are placed about as far as possible from the adjectives, though if there are any two classes of words which ought to belong together, they are these two, which have comparison in common. In the case of the verbs, those things are often grouped together which belong together lexically but not grammatically.[36]

The translation-method is injurious here too, because it veils contours which ought to be sharp. For instance, the pupils will not get the proper conception of gender and its relation to expressions for sex, if er referring to der hut and sie referring to die bank, and likewise il referring to le chapeau, and elle referring to la chaise, are all translated by the English it, while the same pronouns, when used about persons, are translated by he and she.

Comparisons between the languages which the pupils know, for the purpose of showing their differences of economy in the use of linguistic means of expression, will only be a natural outcome of this systematized occupation with the theory of the language, and may often become very interesting, especially for advanced students. (Comparisons between the reflexive pronouns in the different languages; du ihr Sie sie—toi vous vous ils elles eux—you you you they—il y a, es giebt, there is, etc.). The teacher may call attention to the inconsistency of the languages; what is distinctly expressed in one case is in another case not designated by any outward sign (haus hÄuser; hÄuschen hÄuschen—house houses; sheep sheep—cheval chevaux; vers vers—yes in reality also maison, maisons, etc.; mich mir, dich dir, sich sich; der mann, die frau, das weib; ein guter mann, eine gute frau, ein gutes weib; der gute mann, die gute frau, das gute weib; die mÄnner, die frauen, die weiber; die guten m., f., w., etc.). In French and English, there is ample occasion to point out how differently the grammatical relations present themselves in sound and on paper (singular and plural alike in bon bons, beau beaux, hideux hideux, further amer amÈre, clair claire, rÉvolutionnaire rÉvolutionnaire " church churches, judge judges " sin sinned, fine fined " say said, lay laid, etc.). That this may be a good way to make a beginning in comparative philology scarcely needs further proof; many things belonging to this field of study can be understood by our advanced pupils, and ought to belong to a good general education. Everyone who has received a little more than the most ordinary school education ought to understand what is meant by the relationship and development of languages; he ought to be acquainted with such linguistic phenomena as the loss of sounds, assimilation, analogical formations, differentiations, etc.; he ought to have noticed examples of these phenomena, both in his mother tongue and in the foreign languages which he has learned, just as he ought to realize how these processes continually influence the whole construction of the languages, and, in the course of time, have produced such great differences as those he sees between German and English, or between Latin and French; a valuable point of departure would be to take up the fate of French loan-words in English with the frequent retention of the old French sounds (ch in chase, j in journal, n in cousin cousine, s in beast, feast, etc.). But however interesting and valuable these things are, it is scarcely advisable to devote too much time to them as long as the living languages have so few hours at their disposal. How much or how little of this sort of thing the teacher takes up will also, to a great extent, depend upon whether the class on the whole is ripe for it, and if the pupils show sufficient interest and desire to ask questions; very much philology ought not to be forced upon them.

Exercises in systematization need not be limited to the field of grammar; the lexical side of the language may also be taken up in a similar manner, even if to a less extent. Several methods of reviewing vocabulary have been mentioned above, but there are still more ways; for instance the teacher may give the pupil a certain subject (the human body, war, a railway journey) about which he is to collect all the words and expressions which he can remember—or which occurred in the last narrative read—and he may also arrange them in various subdivisions. This can best be done in the form of a written exercise.

The pupils may also be set to separate a complex event or series of actions, etc., into its single component parts. For instance, they may describe the process of getting dressed in all its details, or the way to school in the morning. The more detailed the pupils can make their descriptions, the better; they thus get use for a number not only of substantives but especially of verbs in their natural connection, which they see before them in their “mind’s eye”—but I scarcely think that Gouin’s ideas[37] ought to be used for more than such occasional series.

Advanced students may also be instructed in a systematic collecting of the most important synonyms. Each one should have a special note-book for the purpose, where a whole page is given to each group of synonyms which the teacher wants them to treat; on this page they write down all those sentences where they come across the word in question. Now and then the teacher and the class together may examine all the sentences which have been collected and try to establish the difference between the synonyms on the basis of the examples found. Of especial value are of course those sentences where several synonyms occur directly after each other (How much of history we have in the story of Arthur is doubtful. What is not very thrilling as story may be of profound interest as history. Half a loaf is better than no bread. A nice little loaf of brown bread). It will also be of interest occasionally to draw up comparative tabular lists from different languages as for instance—

to which remarks may be added about the use of human being and individu when indication of sex is to be avoided. Furthermore—

Such tables will do more than long explanations to illustrate the differences between the languages, and to show how often words are ambiguous and vague in meaning. It is evident, however, that many of the subtle and fanciful indications of shades of meaning found in the dictionaries of synonyms are entirely beyond the grasp of ordinary pupils.

Dr. Walter, in Frankfurt, has still another way of furthering his pupils’ familiarity with the resources of the foreign language; he dictates some of the sentences from what has been read, and lets the pupils themselves find as many different ways as possible of expressing the same thought. I shall reprint one of the sentences from his book, together with the pupils’ variants (marked with letters); they were written down in the course of 25 minutes: “ohne vorausgegangene besprechung” (in the second year of instruction, with, so far as I know, six hours a week); as will be seen, the variations are rather considerable.

The advantage of the English ships lay not in bulk, but in construction.

I have myself, in teaching advanced pupils, in a similar way, let them re-write a half a page or so of a historical work. It has always interested them, and the comparison of the results, which often presented the most varied expressions for the same thought, was always very instructive.

Parallel with the reading of a grammar as a supplement to, and a summary of all the grammatical knowledge which has been gained in the ways suggested, it might seem to be a good plan to go through a systematical collection of the lexical material—of course not an ordinary dictionary, since the alphabetical arrangement is about as unsystematical as possible, but a sensibly arranged vocabulary, something in the line of Roget’s Thesaurus. But it ought, at any rate, to be much smaller, and only include words and expressions which are actually necessary; even then, however, the unavoidable dryness of such a book, and the absence of connection between the single words, would make it unfit for use in teaching, even if it were not to be employed in imparting new material, but only to recall words which have already been learned. It would be better worth while for pupils, who have reached a somewhat advanced stage, to go through a little systematic collection of phrases, especially of such turns of expression as play a great part in ordinary daily intercourse, but which are seldom met with in literature. Franke’s Phrases de tous les jours is the best specimen I know of—but I have it from the very best source that this little book was never intended as a text-book for beginners.