How long is a teacher to continue to use exclusively phonetical transcription? That is one of the most difficult questions, and I cannot venture to give a decided answer. The answer will surely always depend partly upon the age and maturity of the pupils and upon how much time can be spent upon the language on the whole. I myself have even dared to go so far that in teaching a class in English, when I only had two hours a week for two years before the final examination, I spent the whole of the first year on phonetical transcription (Sweet’s _Elementarbuch_), and I did not regret it. In French in the lower classes, I once at least used phonetical transcription more than a year, and the only difficulty arose when some boys came in in the course of the year from other schools. At other times, again, I have made the course in phonetical transcription shorter, and on the whole I have experimented in various ways without coming to any certain result--except this: _continue with phonetical transcription as long as possible_. For there is relatively so much more of the language itself learned in this way, that I have not the slightest doubt that the pupil who, with the same number of lessons a week, and at the same age, has read phonetical transcription for two years and orthography for half a year knows more of the language (not only of the pronunciation!) than the pupil who has used phonetical transcription for half a year and thereupon orthography for two and a half years (in all half a year more than the first boy). And then the phonetical transcription itself is such a fine means of training the pupils to minute exactness, because they really have to be constantly on the lookout in order to read neither more nor less than each symbol indicates; therefore I attach great _educational_ significance to phonetical transcription.
But of course we have to begin to learn the orthography some time; and I suppose it is this transition more than anything else that has frightened people away from using phonetical transcription, because they imagine that it must be extremely difficult. But now all those who have dared to try phonetical transcription unanimously declare that they were surprised at the ease with which the transition took place; there was no trouble worth mentioning either for the teacher or the pupils; and they were surprised at the accuracy in orthography displayed by pupils who had been taught in this way. The psychological reason for this is probably to be found in the sharper perception which these pupils necessarily get of the difference between sound and writing, together with the fact that they are not compelled like the others to learn many things at a time (spelling, pronunciation, meaning, inflection), but the orthography is separated out as something which is to be learned by itself about words with whose pronunciation and meaning they have already become quite familiar.