Page 349 - The Story of My Lif

alphabet, as a means of teaching language.

Helen sat poring over them before she could read, not at first for the story, but to
find words she knew; and the definition of new words which is implied in their
context, in their position with reference to words known, added to Helen’s

vocabulary. Books are the storehouse of language, and any child, whether deaf or
not, if he has his attention attracted in any way to printed pages, must learn. He
learns not by reading what he understands, but by reading and remembering
words he does not understand. And though perhaps few children will have as
much precocious interest in books as did Helen Keller, yet the natural curiosity
of every healthy child may be turned to printed pages, especially if the teacher is
clever and plays a word game as Miss Sullivan did.

Helen Keller is supposed to have a special aptitude for languages. It is true rather
that she has a special aptitude for thinking, and her leaning toward language is
due to the fact that language to her meant life. It was not a special subject, like
geography or arithmetic, but her way to outward things.

When at the age of fourteen she had had but a few lessons in German, she read
over the words of “Wilhelm Tell” and managed to get the story. Of grammar she
knew nothing and she cared nothing for it. She got the language from the
language itself, and this is, next to hearing the language spoken, the way for any
one to get a foreign tongue, more vital and, in the end, easier than our
schoolroom method of beginning with the grammar. In the same way she played
with Latin, learning not only from the lessons her first Latin teacher gave her,
but from going over and over the words of a text, a game she played by herself.

Mr. John D. Wright, one of her teachers at the Wright-Humason School, says in
a letter to me:

“Often I found her, when she had a little leisure, sitting in her favourite corner, in
a chair whose arms supported the big volume prepared for the blind, and passing
her finger slowly over the lines of Moliere’s ‘Le Medecin Malgre Lui,’ chuckling
to herself at the comical situations and humorous lines. At that time her actual