My teacher cast on one side all the
usual grammatical difficulties of French study, he aimed at imparting
the language as a living thing. But I with my ignorance of language
could not completely follow this free method of teaching; and yet,
nevertheless, I felt that the teacher had fully grasped the meaning and
the method of his work, and I always enjoyed the lessons on this
account. He was especially successful in accustoming my ear to the
French pronunciation, always separating and reducing it to its simple
sounds and tones, and never merely saying "this is pronounced like the
German _p_, or _b_, or _ae_, or _oe_," etc. The best thing resulting from
this course of study was the complete exposure of my ignorance of German
grammar. I must do myself the justice to say that I had given myself
extraordinary trouble over the works of the most celebrated German
grammarians, trying to bring life and interconnection or even a logical
consequence into German grammar; but I only confused myself the worse
thereby. One man said one thing, another quite the reverse; and not one
of all of them, as far as I could see, had educed his theories from the
life and nature of the speech itself.
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