ppose, begin with the
alphabet until teachers have a suitably printed set of instruction books
to enable them to take the better line. One school teacher I know, in a
public school, devoted the entire first term, the third of a year, to
the alphabet. At the end he was still dissatisfied with the progress of
his pupils. He gave them Russian words, of course, words of which they
knew nothing--in Russian characters. It was too much for them to take
hold of at one and the same time. He did not even think of teaching them
to write French and English words in the strange lettering. He did not
attempt to write his Russian in Latin letters. He was apparently
ignorant of any system of transliteration, and he did nothing to
mitigate the impossible task before him. At the end of the term most of
his pupils gave up the hopeless effort. It is not too much to say that
for a great number of "visualising" people, the double effort at the
outset of Russian is entirely too much. It stops them altogether. But to
almost anyone it is possible to learn Russian if at first it is
presented in a lettering that gives no trouble.

If I found myself obliged to learn Russian urgently, I would get some
accepted system of transliteration, carefully transcribe every word of
Russian in my text-book into the Latin characters, and learn the
elements of the language from my manuscript. A year or so ago I made a
brief visit to Russia with a "Russian Self-Taught" in my pocket. Nothing
sticks, nothing ever did stick of that self-taught Russian except the
words that I learnt in Latin type. Those I remember as I remember all
words, as groups of Latin letters. I learnt to count, for example, up to
a hundred. The other day I failed to recognise the Russian word for
eleven in Russian characters until I had spelt it out. Then I said, "Oh,
of course!" But I knew it when I heard it.

I write of these things from the point of view of the keen learner. Some
Russian teachers will be found to agree with me; others will not. It is
a paradox in the psychology of the teacher that few teachers are willing
to adopt "slick" methods of teaching; they hate cutting corners far more
than they hate obstacles, because their interest is in the teaching and
not in the "getting there." But what we learners want is not an
exquisite, rare knowledge of particulars, we do not want to spend an
hour upon Russian needlessly; we want to get there as quickly and
effectively as possible. And f