“Do not be afraid of unintelligibility, even if it be of whole sentences; your look and the manner of your expression, added to the eager desire to understand, elucidates the one half, and with this, and in due time, the other half also. For with children, as with the Chinese and with men of the world, the manner of pronunciation is half the language. Bear in mind, that they understand their language as well as we understand Greek or any other foreign tongue before learning to speak it. Trust to the deciphering of time and to association. A child of five years of age understands indeed the words “yet,” “truly,” “on the contrary,” “of course”; but for a definition of them one must go not to the child, but to the father! The little word “but” reveals a small philosopher. If the eight-year-old child with his growing power of speech is understood by a child of three, why should you then confine your language to his babbling? Always speak several years in advance (for in books genius speaks to us centuries in advance); with the child of a year, speak as if it were two, with the child of two as if it were six, for the difference of growth may diminish in inverse proportion to the years. Generally speaking, all learning is apt to be too much ascribed to the credit of the teacher—therefore the teacher ought to bear in mind that the child possesses half his world, namely, the spiritual (such as his moral and metaphysical ideas), already complete and taught within himself, and that therefore a language composed only of concrete images can never impart spiritual ideas, but can only light them up. The joy and assurance used in speaking to children ought to be given as if the assurance and joy came from themselves. We can learn speech from them, just as we teach them by means of speech; by means of bold and yet correct word-painting, such as for instance I have heard spoken by children of three and four years of age: ‘leg-fish’ for otter; ‘pig-iron’ for the fork used in eating bacon; ‘the air-mouse’ (unquestionably superior to our word ‘bat’) and so on.”