The Aural System

A clergyman had worked through Otto’s German Grammar—and still could neither speak nor understand German. Charles Hardy asks how a student can learn a language without ever training the ear and tongue.

Writing in the late nineteenth century, after nearly forty years of language study and long periods abroad, Hardy challenges a familiar failure of the classroom: knowing grammar on the page but freezing when a foreign language is spoken. He does not discard grammar; he wants students to put it to work alongside reading, writing, listening and speaking, translating exercises aloud until the new sounds and sentences become familiar. The child’s thousands of hours of practice, he argues, cannot be matched by a lesson or two a week—but a more deliberate method can make every study session count. Can one course of study teach all four skills at once?

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