ABSTRACT
I shall here deal with various kinds of exercises in which the pupils have to say something in the foreign language which they have not either seen in their books or heard from someone else just a moment before. Some of the first and easiest of these are arithmetical exercises. But here I must first stop to make a remark about the numerals in general. It is not so seldom that we find pupils in our schools who have studied French for several years without having become perfectly familiar with the French numerals; they have great difficulty with dates. What is the cause of this phenomenon? Of course the French numerals are difficult, more difficult than the German; but the French verbs are also more difficult than the German, so that alone is not the reason why this class of words troubles the pupils. No; the matter is quite simple. Only imagine a French reader so planned that there is not a single French adjective in the text, while English words like "good," "ugly," "dazzling," "white" are mixed in among the French words. Would the pupils then be able to learn the French adjectives? But is not this exactly what is done in the case of the numerals? It makes no difference if the French text has 1888 or " eighteen dred and eighty-eight," in both cases the pupil has to translate from English to French when he is reading the passage aloud. There are scarcely any exercises at all in translating numerals from French or in understanding French numerals ; as far as this class of words is concerned, the very poorest method of translation is used, the one by which the pupil is himself required to construct expressions in the foreign language according to certain rules, without having previously had sufficient opportunity to see and hear how the foreigners themselves go about it. In the home preparation we may be very sure that only the most conscientious pupils trouble themselves to think about how 1793 ought to be read.
