How to Learn a Language
When William Cobbett told his son James to be conscientious about his grammar lessons, he was drawing on hard-won experience.
1829
King George IV 1820-1830
When William Cobbett told his son James to be conscientious about his grammar lessons, he was drawing on hard-won experience.
1829
King George IV 1820-1830
In one of his letters on English grammar written to his son James, William Cobbett recalled his own quest to learn French many years before. It is not enough, he said, when learning a language to flick casually through a textbook. It is necessary to take each lesson and learn it by heart with absolute precision. The labour would be well rewarded.
YOU must read soberly and slowly, and you must think as you read. You must not hurry on from one Letter to another, as if you were reading a history: but you must have patience to get, if possible, at a clear comprehension of one part of the subject before you proceed to another part. When I was studying the French language, the manner, in which I proceeded, was this: when I had attentively read over, three times, a lesson, or other division of my Grammar, I wrote the lesson down upon a loose sheet of paper. I then read it again several times in my own hand writing. Then I copied it, in a very plain hand, and without a blot, into a book, which I had made for the purpose. But if in writing my lesson down on a loose sheet of paper, I committed one single error, however trifling, I used to tear the paper, and write the whole down again; and, frequently, this occurred three or four times in the writing down of one lesson. I, at first, found this labour very irksome; but, having imposed it on myself as a duty, I faithfully discharged that duty; and long before I had proceeded half the way through my Grammar, I experienced all the benefits of my industry and perseverance.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.