Claude Victor André Marcel

“ It is particularly in the study of classics that routine is pernicious to the young. The university system, which involves an enormous expense of time and money, is no longer in harmony with our civilization. It disregards the diversity of talents, the specialty of individuals, and casts all minds in the same mould. It conforms neither to the laws of Nature nor the needs of modern society; it calls in play neither spontaneity, nor curiosity, nor imitation; it surcharges the memory to the prejudice of the judgment, and aims at verbal acquisition rather than mental culture. ”

“ Peasants need neither to listen, to speak, nor to write a foreign language; reading alone suffices them. The reading aloud of the mother-tongue, taught to children in the primary schools, without stimulating the curiosity or developing the taste for reading, leaves them all their lives with intelligence as limited, and in an ignorance as profound, as if they could not read at all. Such varied and extended reading as this method proposes, creates a taste for reading, and a desire to understand, without which the art of reading is worthless. ”

“ Let the fathers of families unite in appealing to the minister not to permit our lyceums to perpetuate a system of teaching that favors the ignorance of the people as a means of government. But let him take in hand the great work of the regeneration of linguistic study. We must apply to mind, as to matter, new powers and new processes. France will awake to intellectual life, and rise to a level with the most enlightened nations, only when its university teaching is completely conformed to the laws of Nature and the demands of reason. ”

“ If so many young people are indolent and unwilling to study, it is because they are weighed down with lessons and duties repugnant to them: we distort Nature, and do violence to their instincts.
The art of reading a foreign language should be the first in the order of study, as it is the basis on which acquisition of the other three reposes. Besides being easier, more accessible, and attainable without a master, it surpasses them all in the number and importance of the advantages it presents. We derive the greatest benefit from it in the ordinary circumstances of life. ”

“ But in reading, as in listening, the phrase presents itself, as a whole, to the mind; rules which coordinate the composition have no force until its parts are understood. It is, in fact, by language that we comprehend the grammar, not by grammar that we comprehend language. ”

“ They aim, for the most part, exclusively at the acquisition of this art. Despising the order and the wise slowness of Nature, they break the chain which binds together the great purposes of language, neglect direct reading—the inexhaustible source of instruction and intellectual enjoyment—and listening—the most useful part of conversation—and of necessity resort to processes little in harmony with our organization and the nature of language. ”

“ In beginning with grammar, children do not see its utility, and are disgusted. They are neither interested nor profited, because they do not give it their attention. On the contrary, what interest grammar awakens, when, in place of presenting it dead, so to say, in an abstract manner, it is made to arise from the phraseology, rousing the curiosity, leading to the generalization of facts through observation and reflection, and so opening a vast field to the intellect! ”

“ The same is also true of reading, for we rarely have occasion to speak foreign languages, while we may read them daily with profit. In reading, as in listening, we always learn something, and especially the language. In speaking we learn nothing, not even the language; the mind is not enriched with a word or an idea. The habit of following, in reading and hearing, the logical connection of ideas which characterizes serious discourse, forms the mind to all modes of reasoning, to all kinds of argument. ”

“ It is in meditating on the thoughts of the great writers of antiquity, and in translating their masterpieces, that we discover their beauties, and are able to transfer them into our native language.
In living languages these four arts should be the object of study. To say that one class of languages is learned to be spoken, and the other class to be read, does not express the exact difference of aim in the two cases. The art of speaking is useless unless we understand what is said, and this talent of understanding is a hundred times more useful than that of speaking. ”

“ The first book put into their hands is a grammar, the most abstract, the most fatiguing, the most unintelligible book that can be imagined, while, at the same time, it is the most useless at the beginning of the study, when the pupil has not yet gained a knowledge of the facts on which it rests. ”

“ Translation, as ordinarily practised, not as an exercise in French composition, but to construe the authors, violates the law of Nature, which requires that we pass from the phrase to the words. In our native tongue we know the precise sense of words only by the phrases in which they occur; taken separately, they have no determined meaning. A phrase cannot be translated unless it is comprehended, and, to secure this comprehension, we make the translation for the student by employing words to which he attaches no precise idea! How could the mind develop under such a muddle of a system? ”

“ It is more particularly in exercising the judgment that we enrich the memory with useful things. The knowledge we gather in the first years of life we owe to observation and experience—the best of masters—and it is more profoundly engraved upon the memory than all the memorized lessons of college. The mother-tongue is acquired without learning any thing by heart.
Those who, in teaching their pupils to speak a foreign language, give them words to learn, to form into phrases, commit a triple error. In the first place, the child does not learn to talk by passing from words to phrases. ”

“ Like reading, it satisfies the instinctive love of knowledge. If we perfectly understand what is said to us, a few words, a monosyllable, suffices to sustain conversation. This art demands a special exercise all the more, as listening is the true and only means of acquiring pronunciation. The vocal power is entirely under the government of the ear. At the Lyceum, not an hour is given to this exercise in all the course of study. How few persons, after four or five years of English in class, can understand Englishmen when speaking their language, and how few can pronounce English correctly! ”

“ Articulate and written words, the signs of ideas, being conventional, we can apply them justly only so far as we have received the impression associated with the ideas they represent, only so far as they are made familiar by the habit of reading and listening. In other words, the double talent of understanding the written and spoken foreign language conduces respectively to the arts of writing and speaking. ”

“ In the vernacular, we pass from hearing to reading. It is spoken language, the first manifestation of our thought, which gives us the key to written language. In the same way, but in an inverse order, those who learn a language in books should often hear the written text, to familiarize themselves with the pronunciation and to recognize the written words in the spoken words. Their progress in understanding the spoken language will be much more rapid, if they comprehend the written language without translating it. ”

“ Exercises in modern languages should be vehicles of thought without the intervention of the national idiom, and they should be so familiar as to become, through reading and hearing, sources of natural instruction.
The complete knowledge of a language includes four distinct arts—reading, hearing, speaking, writing. In an ancient language we need only the first of these arts. Its study should have no aim but that of giving the pupils the ability to read the classical authors, and appreciate the charm of their compositions. ”

“ However, the university makes the knowledge of a language consist in the art of writing it, the least useful part, the least interesting, and the least calculated to exercise the intelligence under the conditions in which it is done. The translation of a native author into a foreign language, which is frequently imposed upon beginners, surpasses in absurdity the method of syntactic themes. It demands of the inventive faculties that which depends solely on imitation. ”

“ He owes his progress to example, not to precept; to practice, not to theory. Such is the method of Nature, admirable in simplicity and infallible in results. The nearer we come to it the surer will be our success. ”

“ Grammar, exercises, reading aloud, and mnemonic lessons, mere word-practice—the sole resource in teaching to write and speak a foreign language—do not help in the least in learning to read and understand it, nor even in learning to speak and write it, for lack of imitation, by which means alone these arts are acquired. ”

“ As regards the living languages, students leave the lyceum, for the most part, without having attained any of the objects of study. They are persuaded that they have nothing to learn, when they know by heart all the rules of grammar, have written all the themes they contain, and learned a volume of dialogues; when they commence to translate fluently, to read aloud good or bad, and to make correctly grammatical and logical analyses. However, nothing of all this is really the practice of language. ”

“ It is an error to believe, as is commonly done, that we cannot read a foreign text, in the sense we attach to this word, without pronouncing it, at least mentally. In the mother-tongue, the meaning of written words is conveyed to the mind only by the sounds that they represent, the ideas being a priori associated with the sounds. But the words of a foreign language do not recall to the student, any more than to a deaf-mute in his own language, any sound associated with-the sense. ”

“ M. Jules Simon, in suppressing the mnemonic lessons of grammar, has rendered a true service to linguistic teaching. Rules, no matter what, or how many, confided to the memory, will never instruct a man, nor will they give habits of patient observation. A man might learn by heart all the laws that govern the sciences, and hold them as certainties, without at all developing his intelligence. ”

“ Reading aloud can be only a source of error to a beginner. The corrections required will never form good habits, for these are the result of the repetition of correct impressions, such as are produced by the words of the master when reading to his pupils. To speak and pronounce a foreign language correctly, we must hear it spoken habitually. The alphabetic combinations by which we represent the foreign pronunciation are equally irrational. They can only bring to the mind of the student the sounds of his own language. ”

“ It is to falsify Nature to ask from the memory of words that which can alone be given by the memory of things.
All the time spent by a child in learning its lessons by heart is lost, as far as concerns the exercise of judgment and the practice of language. In a class, the great majority of pupils remain idle while waiting their turn of examination. As to the master, what does he do? He does not instruct. Whatever he knows, his knowledge is a dead page for his pupils. He who, in his teaching, does not go beyond the contents of the book is unworthy to be a teacher. ”

“ Direct reading, on the contrary, far from being forgotten, will become by practice a habit of the mind, and, when the pupils leave the Lyceum, their knowledge of English and German will be powerful auxiliaries in the other careers to which they are destined, and they will be able through life, by the aid of the periodic press and new publications, to keep acquainted with all that is published by neighboring people. ”

“ If he translates a good author, he forms the habit of expressing in French only just ideas. He rises to the height of the author by appropriating his thoughts: his own conceptions become more clear by the effort he makes to express them clearly. He thus forms a good style, in trying to reproduce in his translation the qualities of the original. ”

“ It is manifest that the art of speaking, of managing a language at will for all the needs of conversation, consists less in remembering a great number of ready-made phrases, than in the power of constructing at will, and instantly, those that meet the necessities of the moment. It will be more profitable, then, to follow the process of Nature, which consists in constructing phrases for one's self, on a given model, by analogy. ”

“ By endowing youth with the ability to understand a foreign language when spoken, those who travel could, on reaching a country, enjoy the society of the inhabitants, mix in the movements of science, listen to the lessons of celebrated masters, and, in completing their scientific education, establish useful relations for life. ”

“ To appeal to the past, as is done at the university to justify its proceedings, is to hold intelligence in tutelage, and to condemn France to immobility. The world, in growing old, adds to the experience of man. Enlightened as we are by what we have received from our fathers, we commence life in the most favorable conditions. ”

“ Their acquisition is so easy and so rapid, when their study is taken out of the grooves of routine, that a pupil would be able, without neglecting any of the usual studies, to learn and understand half a dozen languages in less time than it would take to learn to speak and write a single one easily and correctly. It is so difficult to speak a foreign language, that in most cases recourse to this art materially hinders international exchange of ideas. ”