that is, by translation. To read a foreign language directly is to think in that language: translation is thinking in our own.
When we have, for a long time, seen in books and heard in the talk of the master words associated directly with the ideas they represent, we have no difficulty in reproducing the orthography and pronunciation, the first elements of writing and speaking. The phraseology thus insensibly engraved upon the mind by repetition becomes one with the thought.
However, inconceivable as it seems, it is insisted that the principal object of studying a living language is, to be able to speak it. From this popular error, from this false point of departure, proceed almost all the methods in vogue. 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.
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. This, it is true, is no great evil, for, out of a hundred people who learn to speak and write, there are not two, perhaps, who ever have serious occasion to use their knowledge. But what pains for nothing! what a loss of time!
Processes and Results.—The art of reading English, for example, is acquired rapidly, without groping, and without error, by taking for the first lessons familiar subjects treated in simple language, as free as possible from idioms, but strictly conformed to usage and to grammar; the French text, equally free from idioms, being placed on the opposite page. The triviality of the language in the first books is, in the end, no hindrance to progress. The best writers, the greatest orators, have begun with puerilities and commonplaces in learning their own language, and it will be the same in another if we assiduously read good authors.
Based on the truth that a student can translate only what he understands, the interpretation on the opposite page presents to him the thought of the foreign text: he passes, phrase by phrase, from the interpretation to the text, that is, from the known idea to the unknown words. Without pronouncing, he reads the French on the English—attaches to each English word the corresponding French word. In accordance with reason, he proceeds from the phrase to the words, from the idea to the sign. This translation is preferable to the use of a dictionary, because it faithfully renders the thought of the author.
