It follows that all methods which require us to use the hand are studial methods; nature knows no more of spellings and handwriting than she does of shorthand, typewriting, and type-setting; all these things are of comparatively recent origin, and all of them have been deliberately invented by man.
All methods which teach meanings by means of etymology are of the studial order; nature intended that each word should become attached to that for which it stands and not become associated with its ancestral etymon or modern cognates. The dictum of nature is that a word means what all speakers of the same language (or variety of language) mean it to mean.
Thus it would appear that nearly everything that the average person actually does when learning a foreign language comes under the heading of the studial processes. He learns rules in order to become proficient in analysis and synthesis; for the same purpose, he memorizes the exceptions to the rules. He becomes (or hopes to become) an expert in pulling words to pieces and in reconstructing them from roots and affixes, in sentence-making and sentence-breaking. He learns chiefly by eye, and expresses himself chiefly by the pen-grasping hand. Indeed, he becomes so proficient in converting the spoken into the written form that he cannot understand or retain the foreign words or sentences he learns until he has converted them into an imaginary written form which, in his imagination, he reads off word by word. Similarly, he finds himself only able to express himself by dint of reading aloud the sentences which he is constructing bit by bit by a complicated process of 'mental writing.' He aims at becoming (and often does become) expert in converting one language into another by a process (unknown to nature) called translating. His accuracy is gained by rapid conversions of words from one inflected form to another: nominatives into accusatives, singulars into plurals, infinitives into participles. He attaches great importance to etymology, and the time he might spend in associating words with their meanings is often devoted to working out the family tree of foreign words. He spends little time in finding out what meanings the natives attach to their words and forms, but much time in identifying the units of etymology and in tracing them from one language to another.