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Show 1 : TO LEARN LANGUAGES. j A New Way Advanced to Master Them in a Short Time. (New Orleans Times-Democrat.) "It doesn't require any great length of time to learn a language if one has patience," said a man who has mastered mas-tered several languages, "and when I hear a man regret that he is not able to speak French, or German, or Spanish, Span-ish, or some other language unknown to him I cannot conceal my amusement. amuse-ment. In nine cases out of ten I might say that the men who express a regret of this sort handle English very poorly poor-ly if that" happens to be their language. The chances are that their vocabularies are extremely limited, and it would probably surprise them to ; know that, despite the advantages of birth and education, ed-ucation, they could not command more than 600 or 700 words in English If their lives depended upon it. Yet they are able to carry on intelligent conversation, conversa-tion, and many of them may become forcible and exen axiomatic in their sayings, and they plunge into discussions discus-sions of . literature, art, music and other subjects of such fine elegance, and do it rather successfully, too. Now how long ought it to take for a man to learn 600 or 700, or even 1,000 words, in any language? Certainly it ought not to take any great length of time, and from my own experience I know that it does not. Of course, I am not speaking now of: mastering so that one can get ;the full benefit of all the refinements of speech in a particular tongue. But I have in mind the idea of speaking intelligibly in-telligibly in a given language and being be-ing able to understand perfectly what is said in return. I have a system which I have worked out, and it has been of vast benefit to me, and has enabled me to learn a number of languages. lan-guages. It occurred to me while I was in Mexico a few years ago on important import-ant business. I could not speak a word of Spanish, and could not understand the language. I concluded that I would learn the language. My plan was simply sim-ply this? I made up my mind that I would not retire at the close of any day as long as I was there without learning learn-ing at least three words in Spanish, how to pronounce them and what they meant. That would give me ninety words per month, or something over 1,000 in a year's time. I stuck to the task, and I was there nine months, and1 as a result of my system I was not only able to converse in Spanish, but carried on my correspondence in Spanish, Span-ish, I don't suppose I could write an essay in the language, but I can speak it, write it and understand it, and it was all brought about by the three words a day system." |