Let us consider for a moment the workings of a boy’s mind when it is his turn to recite and he has to translate such a sentence as, for instance: _cet homme, dont elle ne voyait jamais les enfants_. _Cet_, this, _homme_, man, _dont_, whose--now he discovers that it will not be English if he continues to take one word after the other in the French order, so he looks ahead, tries every word hurriedly; finally he finds _les enfants_, the children; no, I forgot, we must not have the article there in English, so merely children; back to _elle_, she; now he sees that _ne jamais_ must be taken first: never; _voyait_, saw. So instead of taking the French words in the natural order, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, he has to skip backwards and forwards in order to get them in the order 1, 2, 3, (8), 9, 4, 5, 7, 6. In an English text-book for German schools the following sentence[5] is given for translation with numbers indicating the order in which the words are to be taken in English: ^1Würden ^2Sie ^3nicht ^6viel ^7zeit ^5gehabt ^4haben ^8wenn ^9Sie ^{ 11}nicht ^{ 15}jenen ^{ 16}brief ^{ 13}zu ^{ 14}schreiben ^{ 12}gehabt ^{ 10}hätten. In other cases, it is the pupils themselves who by means of numbers and letters (“paving letters”) smooth the difficulty of translation. Anyone who is accustomed to translate German at sight knows how when he has translated the subject of a dependent clause he silently runs through what follows, often several lines, in order to find the verb, which according to English usage must not be too far separated from its subject, and how in hastily trying each single word his attention is drawn to a number of subordinate thoughts while the main thought stands and waits, as it were. This mental process is made even more complicated by the fact that only in a minority of cases does every word in a sentence (like the simple sentence given above) in any way correspond to an English word; as a rule the translator also has to think about such questions as, does _sich_ here mean him, or her, or himself, or herself, or itself, or oneself; does _si_ mean so, or as, or if; is _il fait_ to be taken as he does, he makes, he has (something done), or it does, or it is, or in still another way, etc., etc. This mental process, which is much more complicated than would generally be supposed, is far beyond the ability of the children. Therefore they often remain contented with the text-book’s, the teacher’s or the parent’s translation, which is learned partly or entirely by heart; otherwise the translation is apt to swarm with the well-known offences against the mother-tongue, word-formations, phrases, expressions, order of words, etc., which are not English. Since the teacher of course cannot put up with this murdering of the King’s English, a large part of every lesson in the foreign language has to be spent in the troublesome task of rooting out these barbarisms.