International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1932)

784 — be able to understand fully any text. He who does not feel the harmony, or the strength, and realize within himself the value of every expression would do better to avail himself of a simple translation ". This seems to be the correct point of view in the matter. At the same time, everybody ought to convince himself personally of the correctness of this way of thinking. It is not in any way my intention to force anyone to share my opinions, but I only wish to affirm that practically my one desire is to teach how to speak and consequently whenever the occasion arises, I shall say " learn to speak " rather than ' learn a language '. A question that is often put is what is the best age for the study of a foreign language. Much has been said on the great adaptability of children and their capacity to retain words and fragments of sentences, and from this people have sought to prove that childhood is the age when the study of languages should be begun. I must cite here Jean-Jacques Rousseau who was of a contrary opinion when he observed : " It may cause surprise if I say I count the study of languages among the many useless things in education, but it should be remembered in connection with this that I am speaking of early studies. Whatever anyone may say, I do not think that up to the age of 12 or 1 5 any child, apart from so called infant prodigies, has ever learnt two languages . . . For the child everything can have a thousand different signs, but every idea can only have but one form for him. The child can therefore only learn to speak one language. Notwithstanding this, he appears to learn several, but I deny it. I have seen little prodigies who supposed they could talk five or six languages. I have heard them talk successively German, French and Italian, but although they used different words, they Were speaking German all the time. In other words, give children as many synonyms as you like, you will change the words, but not the language, and the children will only know one tongue '. I have accepted Rousseau's opinion as my own, but I should like to add one thing. If children learn more than one language through practising in actual life and not through one or more teachers' voices, as often happens with children who live near a two language frontier, it will actually be possible for them to speak several languages, and it will be no longer right to assert that they have merely learnt a number of words by memory. Here, as in all other cases, the school can never take the place of life and its power of making impression. What has been said regarding children's memory and the motives for making them learn several languages requires a little further explanation. In his " Schulpadagogik ", Georges Simmel admits that the potency of the memory increases with age, and only undergoes a certain arrest in its development during the age of puberty probably owing to the increased intensity or the sentimental life at this period. He writes : " The memory for words which have a sentimental value is much stronger than for figures ". When Simmel speaks of words having a sentimental value, he is thinking probably of words which recall personal experiences, of poems read by children and similar things. We can demonstrate as a matter of fact how, by means of the system to which we have referred, it is possible to give methodically a sentimental value to the words of a foreign language. Apart from the intellectual dispositions of the pupils, we must also think of their