古文英用：《闲情偶记》翻译_美文_双语阅读-查字典英语网

古文英用：《闲情偶记》翻译

A girl should be first taught to recognize characters, and only afterwards taught to write them. There is no virtue in quantity: just a few characters each day will do, teaching first those which have the fewest strokes, and which represent things near at hand. As the days and months pass, she can progress from easy to hard, and from few to many. After six months or a year, you won’t have to assign her any passages, she will know how to find things to read by herself. Before her interest in reading flags, you should look out some romances with a good plot, and some novels without obvious weaknesses, and let her leaf through them. In this way a book will not be a book, but a not-angry and not-forbidding teacher who will lead her into the inner halls of learning. Why do I say that? Because the language of romances and novels is the common talk of everyday, and when a woman reads it, it is like meeting with familiar things. For example, if in a sentence there are ten characters and she knows seven and doesn’t know three, let her read it our naturally and there will be no mistake, because she can guess the three characters she does not know from the seven characters she does know. Thus, those three characters were not taught by me, but by the roman or novel. By this means her wits are activated, and she can get the answer on her own by inference. If on top of that a man takes her well in hand and guides her progress from shallow to deep, his discourses on literacy while in bed with her will enter her mind like the timely rain, and will be infinitely easier to absorb than classroom lectures.