A Companion to All German Grammars, and a Manual for Candidates for the Civil and Military Service Examinations (Classic Reprint)
Excerpt from Practical Lessons in German Conversation: A Companion to All German Grammars, and a Manual for Candidates for the Civil and Military Service Examinations The ultimate object of learning a living language is to be able to speak it. In this all are agreed. But how to attain so desirable an object, is to many people as yet a much debated question. There are still many people who fancy that a knowledge of a modern language is most easily "picked up" by a short residence abroad. This is a strange delusion. Surely, it is easier to get your grammar ready-made than to construct it for yourself out of a mass of heterogeneous material, regular and irregular, correct and incorrect, presented all at the same time. For my own part, I have never known a person who, in this manner, had acquired a correct knowledge of any modern language. But I have known many who had acquired a slovenly manner of thinking and speaking, and who had become utterly indifferent to grammatical correctness. A residence abroad is, no doubt, desirable, but requires, at all times, to be supplemented by careful and unremitting study. First, there is the great difficulty of understanding the words spoken by others, and then the difficulty of expressing one's own thoughts and feelings in the same way as foreigners do. In learning our native language we learn first the spoken language, and then the written language. But both must be learned. The order is inverted when we learn a foreign language. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work.
