ON THE TEACHING OF GERMAN

Abstract

TEACHERS of English composition have in the past often exploited the story of Benjamin Franklin's efforts acquire a good vocabulary and a pregnant style. Franklin's method may be employed with good profit by the teacher of modern languages. The fundamental position that names stand for things has introduced object-teaching into every classroom. The other principle is likewise held incontestable, that we aloud most of our ideas in sentences, not in words. The basis, then, is the sentence. Schopenhauer, in his Parerga and Paralipomena, has clearly shown the intellectual benefit that the pupil derives from translation. You have abstract the pure idea, the true meaning from the symbol that represents it. Naked it stands before youuntil you clothe it again with words from your own language. To determine whether a student understands a sentence or not, the teacher has no other means than having him translate it into English. (The advanced student who can define and circumscribe a sentence in the foreign language itself belongs a different category.) When the object of language-instruction is only the correct comprehension of the meaning of a sentence, as, e.g. in the case of many science students, nothing further needs be done. The translation together with a discussion of grammatical points completes the circle. It is otherwise, if the object is not of such immediate and limited application, but the knowledge and mastery of the language itself. It has been an article of faith with language teachers that the student must be taught to think in the foreign or better, exercise his thoughts in the foreign language, without first formulating them in his own and then translating them into the foreign tongue. Of the roads that are supposed lead the golden city, there are many. Translation from the foreign into one's own tongue does not lead there. And have the