In the daily grind of the schoolroom, however, these lofty aspirations seemed very distant.Uses of the language, if thought about at all, were deferred to the time when school or university would be completed. In the meantime, grammar rules were explained to the studentsin their own language, vocabulary lists were learned with translation equivalents, and thensentences— especially constructed to contain only the grammar and vocabulary which hadalready been covered—were laboriously translated, in writing, into and out of the student’s firstlanguage. Such sentences, often bizarrely remote from any conceivable use, have been theoccasion for jokes ever since. We have probably all heard references to the apocryphal ‘My postilion has been struck by lightning’ and the infamous
‘plume de ma tame’.
The phoneticianHenry Sweet, a leading opponent of
grammar translation
language teaching, described them as‘a bag into which grammar and vocabulary are crammed without regard to meaning’ and provided his own parody: ‘The merchant is swimming with the gardener’s son, hut theDutchman has the fine gun’