For, if students do not understand the subject-matter, how can they master the various devices for expressing it forcibly? The time is more usefully spent on less ambitious efforts, so devised that the knowledge of the language and the general intelligence may advance together and step by step. Nature makes no leap, and neither does art, since it imitates nature. We must teach boys to walk before we give them lessons in dancing; to ride on a hobby-horse before we set them on a charger; to prattle before they speak, and to speak before they deliver orations. It was Cicero who said that he could teach no one to deliver orations who had not first learned how to talk.
8. As regards the plurality of tongues, our method, which we will reduce to eight rules, will render the acquisition of the various languages an easy matter.
9. (i) Each language must be learned separately. First of all the mother-tongue must be learned, and then the language that may have to be used in its place, I mean that of the neighbouring nation (for I am of opinion that modern languages should be commenced before the learned ones). Then Latin may be learned, and after Latin, Greek, Hebrew, etc.
One language should always be learned after, and not at the same time as, another; since otherwise both will be learned confusedly. It is only when they have been thoroughly acquired that it is of use to compare them by means of parallel grammars, dictionaries, etc.
10. (ii) Each language must have a definite space of time allotted to it.
We should take care not to convert a subsidiary study into a chief one, or to waste on the acquisition of words the time in which we might gain a knowledge of things. The mother-tongue, since it is intimately connected with the gradual unfolding of the objective world to the senses, necessarily requires several years (I should say eight or ten, or the whole of childhood, with a part of boyhood). We may then proceed to the other modern languages, each of which can be sufficiently mastered in one year.
