TEACHING LANGUAGES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 12468, 12 January 1904, Page 4

TEACHING LANGUAGES.

The wave of interest in commercial and technical education which swept round the Empire a year or two ago has been succeeded by the inevitable trough of comparative indifference. But we have by no means lost the influence of that apparently temporary interest. At the Australasian Science Congress, held last week in Dunedin, Professor Blunt returned to the charge, and agair drew attention to our peculiarly British method of teaching living languages as though they were dead ones. The ■<ad _ inferiority of our people to foreigners in lingual versatility is as notorious as it was when the Prince of Wales drew public attention to our educational follies in the famous Guildhall speech, nor have we yet done anything to improve ourselves in this respect. It is not to be supposed that preferential trade will cut us altogether off from commercial intercourse with foreign nations or from competing in foreign markets. It is much more likely that it will result in an increase of our foreign trade upon fairer and more advantageous lines than we have been pursuing. So that the teaching of languages is as important a phase of commercial education as ever, while it is becoming more and more desirable as travel in foreign lands becomes more and more popular. Professor Blunt's contention that languages should be taught orally is not open to intelligent question, whatever may be thought of the phonetic system. The difficulty really is that our educationalists usually think so little of speaking and so much of writing that they do not even demand that teachers shall pronounce their English correctly, and do not care whether they pronounce a foreign language at all.