The Study of Languages

One may be well grounded in the literature of a language, reading the works of its authors with as great ease as he does his own vernacular, and still, on attempting to converse with a native, will find himself as helpless as a child. The fault is not in his knowledge, but his ear. He may even be able to speak with a certain rash fluency, but he breaks down in trying to understand what is said to him. The sound of the words with which his eye is familiar conveys no sense to his ear.
In a great majority of cases this is the cause of the inability of a stranger, who has studied a foreign language in books, to apply it to practical use. The perusal of a thousand volumes would not enable a student to under-stand a single word of the spoken language.
In this famous book, now being available after a gap of a long time, of which a French edition appeared earlier, a method of learning foreign languages is proposed, which affords an effectual remedy for the evil referred to. The author is a French scholar or rare philosophical culture and linguistic accomplishments, who for many years has pursued the method in his own studies which he recommends to the readers. His success is brilliantly illustrated by the vigour and idiomatic purity which marks the composition of this volume.