2 The Spirit of a Language
true meaning, and much better. Such strange uses of the language are common among learners who choose to be at peace within themselves rather than bow to the traditions of the foreign language, even if they are mistaken grammatically. Natives on the whole do not know what the spirit of their own language is, precisely because in acquiring it they have, on the one hand, developed a mode of thought which they eventually conceive of as the way of thinking; and, on the other hand, they experience — but without becoming aware of it — a reduction of their sensitivity, which they are shocked to discover when confronted with a foreign language. The word “foreign” does not help matters either. Most people do not feel that there is really any point in acquiring another language for what it does to oneself rather than for what it brings to one. If it is true that we blunt our sensitivities by the mere process of acquiring our mother tongue, developing a special way of being while we acquire it, we can then see how important it is to think of language learning as a recovery of the innocence of our self, as a return to our full powers and our full potentials. It can easily be seen that we can achieve this only by rejecting the learning of vocabularies and grammar and by replacing it with as thorough a penetration of the spirit of a language as possible. Methods of teaching to this end are needed, and the one considered in this book has been devised for that purpose. The following chapters will give an idea of how it can be achieved more easily than it would a priori appear here.
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