Basil Gildersleeve on Stephen Krashen

[jeidsath]

The man who keeps the Laudator Temporis Acti blog tells me that he has a list of articles that Basil Gildersleeve wrote for The Nation. The author’s name is not always cited, as in this 1886 article On Learning Foreign Languages, but it is clearly Gildersleeve. Here it is transcribed in full.

There is a section that piqued my interest:

The trouble that a philologian has to encounter is that he carries with him the sense of his profession. He is too much bent on being grammatical; and M. Bréal tells an amusing story of the efforts of a young French professor who betook himself to Germany equipped with the orthodox apparatus for the acquisition of the language. Endowed with a good memory and a prodigious power of work, he mastered his grammar, the 248 irregular verbs and all, in the space of a week. Then he put his knowledge to the test by going to a lecture; but he found, to his dismay, that he could not catch even one grammatical form, not even one of those rascally irregular verbs he had acquired with so much pains. His next point of attack was the vocabulary. Grammar is only the skeleton, words the flesh and blood. So he addressed himself to the radicals of the German language first, and finding a book that offered him a complete assortment of German radicals, he devoured it eagerly and digested his 1,000 roots in four days. The result was not a whit better. His next resource was Ollendorff—‘German in Ninety Lessons.’ Ninety lessons—that means three months. Why not take three lessons a day? In thirty days Ollendorf is his—but not the German language. Jacotot, Robertson, Ploetz follow—all to no purpose. At last he conceived the heroic purpose of committing the dictionary to memory. 30,000 words cannot be considered a trifle. Still, at the rate of 1,000 words a day, a dictionary can be appropriated in a month. The failure was as absolute as before, and, to crown his humiliation, he met certain French artisans who had crossed the border with him and had learned German while working at their trade. The young professor finally succeeded in learning German, and afterwards published his experiences for the benefit of the world.

I was eventually able to find the original Bréal article due to Gildersleeve’s mention of “in the last number of Revue Internationale de l’Enseignement”, and forwarded the link over to Michael Gilleland so he could add it to the blog entry (and so that no one else would have to go through that awful search). The source for the “published experiences” (of which much more detail is given in Bréal) turns out to be Francois Gouin, who wrote The Art of Teaching and Studying Languages.

Gouin is also one of Krashen’s case histories. So we have in the original Nation article, more or less, Gildersleeve’s commentary on Krashen “comprehensible input hypothesis”. Or as close to it as we will see.

[mwh]

OK, I’ll bite, briefly and against my better judgment, for Joel does not let go. Gildersleeve was a grammarian and a literary scholar who studied and understood grammar and style and the workings of Greek and Latin (thanks largely to his indebtedness to German scholarship) better than any American of his day. Krashen isn’t—far from it. We can’t know what Gildersleeve’s opinion of Krashen would have been, but I think it would have been very low. He’d have thought him hardly worthy of notice.

Krashen tirelessly and tiresomely advocates “free voluntary reading”—which is of course just what classicists constantly do.

I’ve recently been freely and voluntarily reading selections from Erasmus’ correspondence, as I posted on the Latin board this morning, and I’ve been finding it extraordinarily well worth while—and a far better way of acquiring fluency and improving competence (among other things) than ploughing through Krashen’s tendentious and endlessly recycled output.

So I say: Forget Krashen, read Erasmus, or any other Latin or Greek you think you might enjoy.

[jeidsath]

I read to my children the other day, from T.H. White, that the first law of a beast of the foot (a hound, horse, or hawk), was to “never let go”. He must have taken this from some early hunting manual, as he did the entire character of William Twyti and much of Twyti’s dialogue later in the novel, but I can’t find what it is. The “Boke of St. Albans” divides animals into “beasts of swete fewte” and “beasts of the stinking fewte” (quoted in Master of Game as “beast of the sweet foot”, but that must mean fewmet), and there is nothing (so far as I can find) that singles out the three essential animals of Medieval hunter as White does, nor sets down any sort of “laws”.

Michael, you say that we should do like Krashen says, to read more, but to not read Krashen, and then say that we should read Gildersleeve, but without your post giving any indication that you’ve read the linked Gildersleeve article. I’m glad that you support free reading, and reading Erasmus’ letters is one of the main reasons that I’d like to seriously take up Latin some day. My own Greek reading this week has been Euripides, along with Plutarch and Herodotus. I’m afraid that there are still a number of words that I don’t know and have to pass on in Euripides, but not nearly so many as a year and a half ago when I took up this project, and you were so wild with the bad-tempered criticism. In fact, I have to say that my Greek has gotten far better, as Krashen predicted, and as you did not. In the past, I had tried pick up the Lives several times, but it was just a bit too difficult a slog, until last month, when it was suddenly easy and rapid. Herodotus is flowing. And Euripides is…manageable. We’ll see where I’m at in a few months.

But as not to lose Gildersleeve’s criticism of input hypothesis, which is the whole reason that I put together this thread, here it is:

Still, with all respect for M. Bréal, the time spent on grammar, roots, Ollendorff, and dictionary was not all wasted. The true way to learn a language is to take it in at every pore, and the philological pore is not to be despised. A mature man cannot become a child again, although it is very true that in order to learn a language well one must get into childlike ways of mimicry. People who are plagued with a profound sense of their personal dignity never learn to speak a foreign language well. Of course M. Bréal is too sensible a man not to emphasize the fact that this infantine knowledge of language goes even more rapidly than it comes. A child learns a language perfectly in a year, and forgets it totally in six months; and those who learn languages as children do unlearn them with corresponding facility.

Much that M. Bréal says on the education of the ear, on the mastery of phrases, is excellent. For English as against German he has much to say. English is much nearer akin to the French than is German, it is the French form of the Germanic mind. It is a beautiful language, “all sinew and muscle, a language that seems to have resolved the problem of packing away the maximum of esprit in the minimum of matter”; and the short monosyllables which the German poet Platen detested, carry to M. Bréal’s mind a sense of plenitude and strength. At the same time, he acknowledges that, owing to a false start, he has never been able himself to do much with it practically, and he unconsciously illustrates the trickiness of our idiom by supposing a child equally at home in English and in French to address his English-speaking mother with the startling phrase, “Let me come on your knees” (Prends-moi sur tes genoux)— which is, being interpreted, “Take me on your lap.”

I think that Gildersleeve makes a good overall point here, though he is being somewhat facile about losing languages. Are there really forms of any language learning that aren’t forgotten as quickly as any other without practice? His statement that “people who are plagued with a profound sense of their personal dignity never learn to speak a foreign language well” strikes me as the truest thing that anyone can say on the topic.

I’ll post some of the parts from Bréal’s article “on the education of the ear, on the mastery of phrases” that Gildersleeve commends. (Or someone else here can who actually speaks French and gets to it first.)

[mwh]

Joel, I have no appetite for this. I think there are better things we could be doing than delving into Gildersleeve’s ancient critiques, though they’re always good to read—and all too easy to cherrypick. This is not the first time you’ve fastened on his pronouncement that “The true way to learn a language is to take it in at every pore” (with which I’d agree, allowing for his 19th-century extravagance with metaphor), and this time you have the grace to include his follow-up that “the philological pore is not to be despised.” Certainly he did not despise it (nor did Erasmus when he set himself to learn Greek). He devoted most of his life to it—to that and to the Confederate cause.

I don’t doubt that you’ve gotten better at Greek. I never had any doubt that you would, though you seem to think I did. This is not the first time you’ve misrepresented me and leveled false accusations against me. And I don’t understand why you’re so obsessed with personal vindication. But never mind. There’s more that unites us than divides us.