Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 July 1885 — The Mastery of a Language. [ARTICLE]

The Mastery of a Language.

The real colloquial acquisition of any foreign tongue is stated by Dr. Walshe, in a recent work on the linguistic faculty, to be extremely rare’ He thinks it next to impossible for a man to learn his own and even one other language so as to speak both of them with a proper intonation, inflection, vocal ring, pronunciation, accent, and fluency so well as to be able to translate from either language into the other with correct phraseology, word collocation, and idiom an epigrammatic article on the topics of the day and a serious disquisition on a problem of art or literature. Apart from the mental qualifications which must be united in one individual to enable him to readily master a foreign tongue, there are many of a physical character which evidently can be but very rarely overcome. A gbeat many people prefer a second glass to a second thought.