Excerpt from Companion to Schiller's Wilhelm Tell: Being a Complete Vocabulary, With Notes and Historical and Grammatical IntroductionsAbout the plan, I am far from supposing that I have hit on one that will admit of no improvement, and I shall be greatly indebted to anyone who will send me sug gestions or even criticisms. But of one thing I am firmly convinced, viz., that in reading a strange language the beginner requires much more help than he usually gets, and further that this help should be given him in the form of a vocabulary, and not of a translation. With a translation the learner does not extract the author's meaning from his words, but starting with a knowledge of the meaning, he tries to make the words square with it. This is obviously a very inferior exercise of the learner's intelligence, but is it a good exercise for acquiring the language I strongly incline to the opinion that it is not. The pupil does not observe the foreign words sufficiently accurately for them to make any firm impression on his mind. What may be called the machinery of the language, the variation of the precise meanin g of a word by means of case, person, mood or tense, is hardly perceived at all.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.