to say; while left to themselves they first practise the easiest
syllables, and then, adding to them little by little some meaning
which their gestures explain, they teach you their own words before
they learn yours. By this means they do not acquire your words
till they have understood them. Being in no hurry to use them, they
begin by carefully observing the sense in which you use them, and
when they are sure of them they adopt them.

The worst evil resulting from the precocious use of speech by young
children is that we not only fail to understand the first words
they use, we misunderstand them without knowing it; so that while
they seem to answer us correctly, they fail to understand us and we
them. This is the most frequent cause of our surprise at children's
sayings; we attribute to them ideas which they did not attach to
their words. This lack of attention on our part to the real meaning
which words have for children seems to me the cause of their earliest
misconceptions; and these misconceptions, even when corrected,
colour their whole course of thought for the rest of their life. I
shall have several opportunities of illustrating these by examples
later on.

Let the child's vocabulary, therefore, be limited; it is very
undesirable that he should have more words than ideas, that he
should be able to say more than he thinks. One of the reasons why
peasants are generally shrewder than townsfolk is, I think, that
their vocabulary is smaller. They have few ideas, but those few
are thoroughly grasped.

The infant is progressing in several ways at once; he is learning
to talk, eat, and walk about the same time. This is really the