Otto Jespersen

“ Compare the advantage of being able to talk with the inhabitants of the Fiji Islands in their own language with the advantage of being conversant with French or German. If all that we desire or all that we can ever hope to attain in any one language is to receive thoughts, to acquaint ourselves with the works of foreign authors, while we ourselves neither expect nor wish to be able to impart our own thoughts in it, it is always a question if it is not better to use translations than to learn the language itself, especially in the case of the dead languages. ”

“ Phonetics is a science, to be sure, and, like all other sciences, it is not without its difficult and mooted points. Yet the fact that large volumes can be written [143] about botany does not frighten us from teaching our children some botany. In mathematics there are many things which are beyond the comprehension of ordinary school-children, but yet they have to learn some mathematics. Phonetics is not a new study that we want to add to the school curriculum; we only want to take as much of the science as will really be a positive help in learning something which has to be learned anyway. ”

“ In giving the pupil English sentences to translate into the foreign language, we are only artificially creating difficulties. If it is difficult for the pupil to translate into his mother-tongue where at least confirmed habit ought to prevent him from falling into the worst pitfalls, then it must be much more difficult, indeed impossible, to translate into [124] a foreign language where he is not yet quite at home. We ourselves lead the pupil to make mistakes, and then we have to do all we can to prevent his confronting us with a too overwhelming number of them. ”

“ Reading in unison ought not to be neglected; it has the advantage of occupying the whole class at once, so that the pupils get more practice in producing the foreign sounds than when each one reads separately. Of course the teacher cannot exercise so sharp a control as when he hears one at a time, but yet he has by no means lost his control; by practice, he can learn to detect single mistakes through the whole chorus, and can even be tolerably certain as to where they come from, and then he can get the suspected pupil (or pupils) to read the difficult part alone. ”

“ When will people finally realize that everything cannot be learned at once? Many subjects, and with so few hours a week for each that the pupils forget what they have learned from one lesson to the next—that is a frightful waste of time. ”

“ If by a receptive command of a foreign language is meant the ability to understand it, and by a productive command, the power to express oneself in the language, then I am fully convinced that anyone who merely concerns himself with the receptive side of it injures himself and acquires far less ability to understand it than if he had from the very beginning also aimed at a productive command of the language. Therefore our all round exercises will give our pupils at least just as much receptive knowledge of the language as is attained by the pupils of others ”

“ The most prominent feature of the teaching is haste; there is much to be done, especially as examination draws on. It seems to be an established custom that the examination marks are determined by the quality of the translation, and it is in order to get practice in translating that the reading selections are gone through as many times as possible. There is not much time for reading aloud; why, when one has only learned the main principles of pronunciation, one can generally infer the pronunciation of any word from the spelling, especially in German, but also in French. ”

“ When the users of the language produce them at long intervals, it is generally with the utmost caution, because they merely have a hazy conception of what the proper form of the expressions ought to be. But they are taken up in the grammars, and as soon as one grammarian has caught sight of one of them, it is carefully copied in all succeeding grammars for the sake of completeness. Foreign grammarians are even more inclined than the natives to pay attention to everything of that kind because they have no instinctive feeling of what is rare and what is common. ”

“ The pupils must read—read more and more, read better and better books, books whose contents are of a nature to hold their attention and to give them as much all round information and development as possible—accordingly, as has been previously suggested, not solely works of literature. That sort of reading is especially good which gives the pupils some insight into the foreign nation’s peculiarity in the widest sense of the word, and best of all is that reading which is apt to make the pupils love what is best in the foreign people. ”

“ In oral instruction, such mistakes are scarcely frequent enough to be worth mentioning, even if it might be a good thing perhaps for teachers to realize that they are possible—they even occur now and then in a child’s apprehension of his native language, which in large part follows exactly these same paths. If the teacher understands his business, no mistake at all occurs or else it is soon corrected, for of course he will never stop at merely pointing to the object and giving the word, but he will immediately use it in sentences and connections in which the meaning becomes perfectly clear ”

“ These want to be treated as living, and the method of teaching them must be as elastic and adaptable as life is restless and variable.
What is the object in the teaching of modern languages? Well, why have we our native tongue? Certainly in order to get the most out of a life lived in a community of our fellow-countrymen, in order to exchange thoughts, feelings and wishes with them, both by receiving something of their psychical contents and by communicating to them something of what dwells in us. Language is not an end in itself, just as little as railway tracks ”

“ In the use of languages I have one faculty which seems to be rather uncommon: that of keeping them entirely separated. When speaking or writing French I am, for the time being, like one totally ignorant of English, as English words do not occur to me, and I never translate anything, not even weights and measures, or money, or the thermometer, from one language to the other, but think in each, independently.”
When Hamerton here says that this ability is unusual, he no doubt means that it is unusual in so high a degree as he had it. ”

“ Even those who have foreign business letters to write for someone else are not generally given every word that is to stand in them, but merely a rough draft of the contents, which they are to clothe in a foreign language as best they can. There remain, then, the few translators connected with the law-courts, the providers of translated novels, and finally the very small number of choice spirits who have the courage to grapple with the valuable and charming art of transplanting poetry in a poetical rendering. ”

“ Examinations cause the mental and physical ruin of many more young men than we can afford. As a test of what a young man is worth in life, an examination is without any value whatever; as a test of how much really valuable knowledge he has, it is not worth much ”

“ If any one now says that this method of procedure by which translation as a test of the pupils’ comprehension of what they have read is limited to the least possible, and in many lessons even the very last remnant of it is done away with, is far less satisfactory than the old-fashioned translating over and over again of the whole lesson, and that the teacher thus has no means of knowing what the pupils understand and what not, I answer that, in the first place, the pupils’ comprehension of a piece which they have even translated several times in the old way is often poor enough ”

“ Some few exercises in artistic translation, which the teacher carefully goes through with them, will help to give the more advanced pupils a vivid perception of some of the most delicate shades of variation in the languages as means of expression for human thought—but as the daily bread of language instruction that kind of exercise is not to be recommended, especially not for beginners. ”

“ But there is another class of literature, that collected by folklorists, which is orally transmitted from generation to generation, and which shows its vigour by being continually amusing and by continually shooting new shoots. Much of it can successfully be used in teaching languages; and that which amuses a French child of five or six years may often amuse an English child of ten or eleven or even more, because in the foreign [27] language it gets the charm that always is connected with the unknown. ”

“ In deciding on what will be of interest as a selection for reading, differences in age must of course to a great extent be taken into consideration. But it is an experience which I myself have had, and in which many teachers bear me out, that beginners in a foreign language may very well be interested in certain reading matter even if they are beyond the age when corresponding things would interest them in their native language. ”

“ By steadily keeping up their practice in transposing phonetical transcription into practical pronunciation the pupils have something of value for their whole life, for, when they no longer have a teacher to ask about the pronunciation of a new word, they can obtain information about it themselves. That which was only a few years ago a possibility reserved for the distant future, namely, that all French and English dictionaries should give the pronunciation according to rational principles, is now, as we know, well under way to become a reality at any time. ”

“ But in addition to that, there ought surely to be read to a far greater extent than has hitherto been the case in modern language instruction, matter which cannot be understood without some serious thinking, articles on natural science and on human relations in the widest sense of the word, political speeches, etc. Many teachers seem to be afraid to read anything else with their pupils than the most insignificant novel-literature whose contents furnish starvation food. ”

“ Those who read foreign authors in the original with real advantage do not actually first translate each word, still less each sentence or each period, into English before they proceed further. Those who are listening to a French lecture or seeing a play in Paris have no time to translate to themselves, but it is not necessary for them to do it either. And finally, it goes without saying that the Englishman who really speaks French and German well does not first construct his sentences in English and then translate them in the same way as a schoolboy translates his exercises. ”