teacher of French, M. Perrault, a Frenchman by birth, who still, even
though an old man, diligently worked at the study of his mother tongue,
and who at the same time wrote and spoke German with elegance. I pursued
the study with ardour, taking two lessons a day, because I desired to
reach a certain proficiency by a given time. Slow, however, were my
steps, for I was far from having a sufficient knowledge of my own tongue
whereon to build a bridge that might carry me into French. I never could
properly acquire what I did not fully understand in such a way that it
had a living meaning for me; and so from all the genuine zeal and
considerable cost which I spent over this study I gained by no means a
corresponding result; but I did learn a good deal, much more even than I
then knew how to turn to account. My teacher cast on one side all the
usual grammatical difficulties of French study, he aimed at imparting
the language as a living thing. But I with my ignorance of language
could not completely follow this free method of teaching; and yet,
nevertheless, I felt that the teacher had fully grasped the meaning and
the method of his work, and I always enjoyed the lessons on this
account. He was especially successful in accustoming my ear to the
French pronunciation, always separating and reducing it to its simple
sounds and tones, and never merely saying "this is pronounced like the
German _p_, or _b_, or _ä_, or _ö_," etc. The best thing resulting from
this course of study was the complete exposure of my ignorance of German
grammar. I must do myself the justice to say that I had given myself
extraordinary trouble over the works of the most celebrated German
grammarians, trying to bring life and interconnection or even a logical
consequence into German grammar; but I only confused myself the worse
thereby. One man said one thing, another quite the reverse; and not one
of all of them, as far as I could see, had educed his theories from the
life and nature of the speech itself. I turned away a second time, quite
disheartened, from the German grammarians, and once more took my own