The all-time champion of hard study was Francois Gouin, who describes his efforts to learn (not acquire) German in his book The Art of Teaching and Studying Languages, published in 1892 and translated into English from French.
When a young man, Gouin traveled to Germany to study
German philosophy, but had no knowledge of German. Expecting to acquire German
in a few weeks, he attended a lecture and understood nothing. He then “set to
work” (p. 10), using they only method he knew: The “classical process,” the way
he had studied Greek and Latin. He began by applying himself “resolutely to the
study of the grammar” of German, and he claims it took him only ten days to
fully master it. He then returned to the university, but again understood nothing:
“... not a word, not a single word would penetrate to my understanding. Nay,
more than this, I did not even distinguish a single one of the irregular verbs
freshly learnt, though they must have certainly fallen in crowds from the lips
of the speakers” (p. 11).
Gouin decided that the problem was that he had only
memorized verbs. The real solution was to memorize verb roots, which he found
in an obscure book. But after learning 800 roots in four days, the result was
the same: Zero comprehension.
He then turned to conversation. He would spent hours
in his hosts’ hairdresser salon, trying to understand what was being said,
“hazarding from time to time a sentence carefully prepared beforehand,
awkwardly constructed with the aid of my roots and grammar, and apparently
always possessing the property of astonishing and hugely amusing the customers”
(p. 14).
Gouin became aware that memorized knowledge of
language was fragile: “Studied in this manner, a language appeared to me under
the guise of Penelope’s web, where the work of the night destroyed the work of
the day” (p. 15). Undaunted, he returned to reading, not comprehensible texts
but those he needed to translate with the use of a dictionary – the works of
Goethe and Schiller. The study of verbs and roots, however, didn’t help: In
reading the texts, he could hardly recognize anything he had studied.
Gouin didn’t give up on the classical method. "So
my work on the roots and irregular verbs seemed to have been in vain.
Nevertheless I could not bring myself to believe this seriously. ‘The fire
smolders under the ashes,’ I assured myself, ‘and will brighten up little by
little. We must read, read, day in and day out; translate, translate
continually; hunt, hunt a hundred times after the same word in the dictionary,
catch it a hundred times, after a hundred times release it; we shall finish by
taming it” (p. 16).
But after a full week, “I had hardly interpreted the
meaning of eight pages, and the ninth did not promise to be less obscure or
less laborious than the preceding” (p. 16). Gouin then gave up on translation
and turned to several popular books that promised to teach the reader German,
and found that they gave contradictory advice. None of them worked. Gouin’s
evaluation of another book, Systematic Vocabulary, is interesting: “The book
made the fortune of its author without producing the results sought for by him”
(p. 24).
On meeting his professors in Berlin, Gouin noted that
they spoke French quite well, and “ ... never ceased wondering how all these
people had learnt this language” (p. 25). But Gouin still didn’t get it, doing
everything except find comprehensible input: He spent a full week listening to
lectures in German, seven to eight hours per day, and concluded that “I might
attend the German university for a thousand years under these conditions
without learning German” (p. 26). But his next step was the strangest of all:
He actually memorized the entire dictionary, 300 pages and 30,000 words, ten
pages a day, over one month. But the result was the same: When Gouin returned
to the university, he still understood nothing. Nor was reading any easier:
Gouin tells us that it took half a day to read two to three pages of Goethe and
Schiller, “and then I was not absolutely sure of having found the real meaning
of the sentences” (p. 31). Gouin then spent another two weeks reviewing the
dictionary, convinced that he had not learned it thoroughly enough the first
time. And after time off because what he described as “a disease to the
eyesight,” he went through the dictionary again, reviewing “only” one-seventh
of it each day of the week. The result was the same.
After this ten month ordeal, Gouin returned home to
France. While he was gone, his nephew, two and a half years old when he left,
had learned to speak French, his first language, and spoke it with “so much
ease, applied to everything with so much surety, so much precision, so much
relevancy ...” (p. 34), and acquired it as a result of “playing round with his
mother, running after flowers, butterflies, and birds, without weariness,
without apparent effort, without even being conscious of his work ...” (p 34),
quite a contrast with Gouin’s experience.
(It should be noted that Gouin’s experiences with
German led him to develop an early version of the “direct method” for foreign
language teaching, which was consistent in some ways with the Comprehension
hypothesis, known as the Series Method.)
Gouin thus had little comprehensible input; in fact,
he seemed to have avoided it. He appears to have engaged in some forced speech
at the hairdresser’s salon, but does not tell us whether his errors were
corrected. His main effort, of course, was conscious learning of grammar and
vocabulary, which he hoped would become automatic language. One can, of course,
argue that Gouin’s learning did not become automatic because he did not
practice enough, i.e. he did not produce enough, did not try to apply the rules
and words he learned in oral and written output.
From:
Krashen, S. 2014. Case Histories and the Comprehension Hypothesis.
TESOL Journal (www.tesol-journal.com), June, 2014 (www.sdkrashen.com, "free voluntary
reading" section)
