MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHING.

Otago Witness, Issue 2325, 22 September 1898, Page 56

MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHING.

(Longman's Magazine.) "The present defect of English education, Irom the top of the scale to the bottom, is our neglect of the cultivation of the modern languages of the' nations of the world!" These words, from one of Sir William Harcourt's. latest speeches, should be taken to heart by all who are interested in the education and progress of our people. Why is it th it our progressive country, which in most things leads the vanguard of cultivation, shruld be so behindhand in speaking and , understanding the languages of other nation's? In the first place, as has been justly pointed out, the English language is spoken nil over the world, and we think we can get on without troubling to learn other lan- ', guages. In the second place the greatness of our country makes us self-sufficient. We mind but little what the foreigner says ; we treat his criticisms with contempt. We are lacking in sympathy for other nations; we do not try to understand them, and we are the losers by it. Other languages often express shades of thought and feeling which are unrepresented in our own because they hold but little place in our lives, and yet which might with advantage be cultivated. We know, for instance, what comfort is, but do „we understand the German "gemuthlichkeit," •which is independent of the luxuries of life? .We are not wanting in thoroughness, but is there much of that higher element of " Innigkeit" in the rush of our existences? The piesence or absence of a word in a language sometimes marks a characteristic notional difference. The words home, "heim," have no exact equivalent among the nations who lea 'I chiefly an outdoor life. Homesickness and " heimweh " are rendered in French by "je mal dv pays," showing that the native village oi locality supersedes the more restricted idea of the house. On the other hand, there is a sentimental ring about the German " Vaterland ' and the French "Patrie ' which is wanting in the English word ( "country." And as each nation, .as Mr Chamberlain once said, has given the feeling "of patriotism a distinctive national character, thp difference may perhaps indicate that British patriotism, intense though it be, is more trfnscendental and less connected with an exclusive attachment to the native soil. It is a fact that the Englishman, who would die for his country, very frequently prefers living out of it. When not bound by duty he makes his home wherever he finds existence easiest, and he is but little tormented with that nostalgia that makes the Swiss loncj for his mountains and the Breton for his native village. There is no language from which expressions might not be ouoted that are only apprcximatelv translatable, hence the study of each language opens up a fresh horizon, and the " humani nihil a me alienum puto " is best realised by the man who knows many torques. The chief cause of our ignorance is the method which has been hitherto generally employed for teaching modern language t They have been taught far too much as if they were dead languages. The teachers hay», been mostly -people who had only a theoretical knowledge of the language, who were unable to speak it, and whose object v. r i3 that their pupils should satisfy the requirements of the examinations, which are bit little in touch with the needs of practical life. A reaction has now- set in, and there is a movement to teach even classical languages in a more vivid and less conventicnal way.