Excerpt from First Italian Book My conviction is that the latter course is the more natural and the easier, and that it leads to results of far better quality. It is natural, in preparation for intellectual creative work in any field, that a period of observation and absorption should precede creative activity. Composition, written or oral, as a feature of initial elementary instruction takes a large share of the student's time and energy, and leads to the commission of more errors, and consequently to the development of more discouragement and hostility, than any other part of the work. Furthermore, the practice of composition at the start gets the student into the habit of framing a foreign sentence as a succession of isolated words, with a laborious dependence on models and vocabularies, and leads to the formation of many erroneous first impres sions. Such linguistic tendencies are vicious in the extreme and are very hard to overcome. If on the other hand the composition be deferred until a considerable acquaintance with the foreign language itself has been attained, the student is able to deal with word groups instead of single words; he may draw freely upon a considerable store of linguistic experience instead of being tied to particular lists and examples; and he can compose with no great danger of excavating brain paths that lead only to red ink. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This 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.