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UC-NRLF $B M7D DMb A ""''Oi^' • '^i THE AET OP TEACHING AND STUDYING LANGUAGES. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/artofteachingstuOOgouirich : THE ART OP TEACHING AND STUDYING LANGUAGES. BX FEANgOIS GOUIN, PfiOFESSEUK D'ALLEMAND A L'lICOLE SUPERIEURE ARAGO, PARI3. TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY W W H ARD S AN AND VICTOR BETIS, JlEilBRK DE L'ENSEIQNEMENT PUBLIC EN FRANCE. SECOND EDITION. LOITDON: GEORGE PHILIP & SON, 32 FLEET STREET; NEW YOKK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, 743 & 745 BROADWAY. %/ FirstEdition^ May 1892, SecondEdition^July 1892. PKEFACE Mankind has long passed from the stage in which speech is used for the mere expression of physical facts and desires, to that in which language is employed as the highest tool within the grasp to paint the pictures of poetic imagination, and sway a world-wide audience to noble thoughts and deeds. Not onlyto satisfythe necessities of travellers in far countries has the studyof language been ever desirable, buttopenetrate the spirit and genius ofHomer, Yirgil, Shakespeare, Goethe, Hugo, Dante, it has become, to the cultured of every country, a necessity for the full gift of a liberal education. Since language became literature, the necessity for the masteryover other tongues than his own has forcedtheattentionofstudent and of professor to the problemofthestudyoflanguages; and the great intellectual value of a complete and logical system for the mastery of tongues, if such could be found, is so apparent, that the greatest honour has always been awarded to discoverers in this region, which is still felt, however, to be to a large extent unexplored, or at least unconquered.. Theworld hasthisyearseenamagnificentcelebrationof the grand servicestothecause of education rendered byComenius. In spite of this we are still far from having definitely adopted in our school and college practice the now acknowledged — principles perceived by Comenius that education must be organic and not mechanical, that language teaching, modern and classic, should proceed by dealing with things and not with words and grammatical abstractions, and that before all else education should have direct bearing upon actual life. The late Mr. W. H. Widgery, M.A., has a veiy pregnant sentence in almost thefirst paragraph of hisadmirable booklet — ; vi PREFACE. on "The Teaching of Languages inSchools" (D. Nutt), where he says "Ourgreatmodernreformers, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, have been the sources of mighty inspirations; they have pointed out in the rough the paths along which we must travel. They failed in system. We now need rather some powerful organiser, well trained in philosophy, in logic, in psychology, one whowilldoactual school-workforsome years, and then clear for us the jungle of educational literature." Mr. Widgery evidently looked for his language-organiser to come after manyyears and afterwearylabour. Thislabour is, happily, as will be seen, already in great part accomplished andthework organised; and perhaps no sentence could better express what it is that the work of M. Frangois Gouin, here presented, attempts to perform. This work might not inaptly be entitled "The Gift of Lan- guages, and How to Acquire it; being an Investigation into Linguistic Psychology." It will be found to appeal, not only to the teacher and the specialist in pedagogic science, but to the student and the general reader, for in its train it draws interesting and far-reaching developments. It is primarily an investigation into the psychological laws underlying the universal act of learning the mother-tongue by the little child, and, springing therefrom, the ex—position of an artificial system of teaching foreign languages a system which produces peculiarly successful results and endows the learner with the gift for languages: and these results ^-e curiously easy of explanation, being based on the laws of gradual development of the human mind itself. It may be well to point out at once that the work of M. Gouin is essentially a —new departure; it is based upon a close observation of nature that of the little child at its games weaving its own individuality and learning its native tongue its mental operations are analysed with extreme care and described with a clearness and simplicity to which one is not always accustomed in subjects so apparently abstruse as that of psychology. The system set forth is not a variation of the ordinary col-