Memory; Repetition

The next problem is, how best to retain these associations in the memory.

As even the strongest associations are liable to be weakened by disuse and lapse of time, the principle of economy is allimportant: that is, of giving the learner only such material as he wants at the time or is likely to want within a short period. Thus, if he is to give a certain time to reading nothing but Cæsar's Commentaries, in which the verb occurs only in the third person, it is evident that if he is to be provided with a special Latin grammar for that purpose, it ought to exclude the first and second persons of the verb. In the German grammar I began with,the word hornung, ' February,' was given as an exception to the rule that nouns in -ung are feminine, and for many years no German word was more familiar to me, except perhaps petschaft, 'seal,' whose acquaintance I made at the same time and in the same way. But to the present day I cannot remember having met with either of them in any Modern German book, still less of ever having heard them in conversation, hornung being now entirely obsolete except in some German dialects. At last, when I began Middle High German, I met with it for the first time in my life in a poem of Walther von der Vogelweide, but by this time I had forgotten all about it, and so failed to recognize it, especially as it appeared in the slightly disguised form of hornunc, which, I know not why, made me guess it to mean hornet.' I am glad to see that this and other words of a similar character are now often omited from German grammars.

Economy teaches us to begin with as small a vocabulary as possible, and to master that vocabulary thoroughly before proceeding to learn new words. In this, and in many other ways, it confirms the general principles of directness and simplicity.

Repetition is essential both for forming associations and retaining them in the memory.

It is an additional argument for working as long as possible with a limited vocabulary, for the smaller the vocabulary, the greater chance the different words, forms, and constructions have of being repeated.

But there is a point beyond which repetition becomes wasteful -and in two ways. In the first place, the excessive repetition

of one detail hinders the due repetition of other details. Secondly, such excessive repetition is wearying to the learner, who is already familiar with the detail in question, and so any further repetition of it causes his attention to flag. This is the great danger of using grammatical illustrations made on the impulse of the moment by the writer instead of being collected from a variety of texts by different authors. In such illustrations certain words and constructions tend to recur with a frequency of which the writer is unconscious until he revises what he has written from this special point of view. He will then find that in a chapter on the syntax of the numerals he has, perhaps, given one particular numeral five times as often as any other, and has omitted to give any examples at all of some of them, when he might just as well have utilized his sentences to give each of the more important numerals a fair proportion of examples.

The various devices of artificial memory or memoria technica are of even less use in language than in other branches of study. The whole business of learning languages consists in establishing associations, which can often be effected only by long-continued effort. It is therefore a waste of energy to take on oneself the additional burden of the extraneous associations by which an artificial memory is built up.

Such devices as printing feminine nouns in a dictionary in capitals are liable to similar objections, and are quite superfluous (p. 100).

Of course, if extraneous associations come unsought, they should-and, indeed, inevitably will-be utilized, as in the cases already discussed under the head of 'accidental resemblances' (p. 91). But most of these are not strictly parallel to memoria technica-at least, not those in which the association between the two words is direct, as in hólos whole, and does not require the introduction of a third element. Some of the methods recommended under the head of 'nomic pronunciation' (p. 34) have also a resemblance to memoria technica, but they are simply cases of the modification of the materials of existing associations.

Learning by heart should not be attempted till the piece has been thoroughly studied from all sides. To learn a piece by heart before it has been properly studied and grammatically

analyzed is often rather injurious than otherwise, as it tends to take away the sense of interest and freshness, and to deaden and blunt the observing faculties.

Besides, by the time the piece has been thoroughly studied, the knowledge implied in learning by heart will have come of itself if the learner has a fairly good memory. If he has not, learning by heart is simply a waste of time. If he cannot retain in his memory even a short, simple poem in his own language, he cannot be expected to learn by heart in a foreign language; and if he can learn his own language by imitation and reproduction after a pattern without learning by heart, he can do the same with a foreign language.

Interest

Memory depends also on attention, and this partly on the interest taken in the subject. If we take no interest either in the language itself or the text we are reading, our attention inevitably flags. The genuine linguist, on the other hand, is only stimulated all the more by difficulties. Oriental languages are more difficult than European languages, but they have the charm of remoteness and complete novelty, and stimulate curiosity and interest to the highest degree, so that in learning them we endure drudgery which would seem intolerable if spent on a comparatively insipid Romance language, which we half know beforehand.

But we must be careful not to confuse interest in the literature with interest in the language. An absorbing interest in what we are reading, speaking, or hearing, so far from helping us to remember and observe the phenomena of the language, has the opposite effect. If the reader is 'panting to arrive at the thrilling dénouement' of a sensational novel, he is certainly not in the mood for observing niceties of syntax.

Another difficulty is that the unfamiliar is what is interesting, while all sound principles of linguistic study tell us that we ought to begin with the expression of those ideas and the descriptions of those things and circumstances which are most familiar to us, or will be so when we have acquired the language. In learning French we ought to begin with what is common to both France and England, French and English life, and when we pass beyond English associations, to be initiated gradually into French ones: we do not wish to

accompany Jules Verne into the heart of Africa. Nor will reading about exciting adventures of Englishmen in New Guinea give a foreigner a good vocabulary for a visit to London.

Then, again, all reading that is profitable from a linguistic point of view must at first be very slow, and interrupted by incessant repetitions; and no text can be very interesting under these conditions.

If the learner is interested in the language itself, that is enough. If he has a strong motive for learning the language as quickly as possible as a means to an end, or simply because he wants to get through the drudgery as quickly as possible, he will regard those texts as most satisfactory which bring him to the goal with the greatest ease and quickness; that is, he will prefer texts in which the meanings of words and their constructions unfold themselves easily from a simple context of progressive difficulty, in which there is repetition enough to help the memory, and yet variety enough to keep the attention on the alert. He will prefer such texts as long as they are not ostentatiously trivial and vulgar, to more interesting ones with which he feels he is not making the same linguistic progress. If he has to choose between an anecdote of a Lacedemonian and an Athenian, a fable about a fox and a goat, a funny story about a red rose, 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star,' and a description of the furniture of a drawing-room, he may possibly choose the latter for a variety of reasons: because he knows the anecdotes already, because he does not care for poetry, but mainly because he thinks the description of a drawing-room may teach him some words which he cannot find explained in his dictionary, and which may be useful to him when he visits the country itself.

The Gouin-method is a good instance of the 'interest-fallacy.' According to Gouin himself, his series-method was first suggested to him by observing a nephew of his, who, after seeing a mill for the first time, began to play at being a miller, talking all the time to himself, 'First I fill the sack with corn-then I put it on my back and carry it to the mill . . . the water falls on the mill-wheel, and the wheel goes round-the wheel turns the millstone-the millstone grinds the corn,' and so on. Gouin fails to see that there is a wide difference between taking a lively interest in a novelty and being interested in the

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vocabulary connected with the object after it has ceased to be a novelty. Even while the child was playing at being a miller, its interest was not in the words, but in what the words expressed the attitude of its mind was that of the absorbed novelreader. We know how soon the child's mind tires of any one object of interest; and we may be sure that if a year afterwards M. Gouin's nephew had had to go through the same mill-series in a foreign language, the old interest would not have been forthcoming, and the youth would perhaps have declined to take part in any series in which tin soldiers and a popgun did not figure. If the old interest had been forthcoming, it would have been as much a hindrance to mastering the details of the foreign language as in the case of the novel-reader. Besides, all children are not equally interested in the construction of a mill, even when it is a novelty; and certainly some of the series, such as that which gives a detailed description of opening and shutting a door-'I walk towards the door, I approach the door, I approach nearer, I approach nearer still, I put out my arm, I take hold of the handle—are as uninteresting as they are useless.

As I have indicated already, the only safe concessions that can be made to interest are negative: be dull and commonplace, but not too much so.

Thus, although repetition is essential, there are some kinds of repetition which are so wearisome to the learner that they can hardly be used in teaching, in spite of certain special advantages they possess. I mean such methods as that of repeating a long Latin speech in oratio obliqua in order to show the accompanying changes of construction, or of conjugating a whole sentence through a variety of moods and tenses. It is strange that Gouin, who attaches so much importance to stimulating the pupil's interest in the subject-matter, should advocate teaching the verb by means of such repetitions as these: 'To-day the postman will come before we have breakfast-while we are at breakfast-after we have had breakfast. Yesterday the postman came before we had breakfast to-morrow the postman will come before we have breakfast... Such methods should only be used occasionally in the grammar, not made a standing feature of the method.