Acceso usuarios
, María Heredia Mantis
In this paper, we present and examine a little-known manual for teaching Spanish to German speakers in the 19th century, whose primary author is nonetheless quite renowned: the poet, playwright, intellectual, and member of the Spanish Royal Academy, Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch. As a Spanish-German—his father being of German origin—Hartzenbusch initiated and directed the work Eco de Madrid, ó sea, curso práctico de la buena conversación española (1858, 1st ed.), which constitutes the focus of our study. The manual consists of 93 dialogues, composed by Hartzenbusch and Enrique Lemming (professor of German and English at the Central University of Madrid), and a brief Spanish-German dictionary authored by Booch-Árkossy, who also produced other materials for teaching Spanish in Germany. Given the content of the manual, it is situated within the broader context of Spanish language instruction for German speakers in the 19th century, following the works of Sánchez Pérez (1992), Voigt (1998), and Sáez Rivera (2014). More specifically, it belongs to the genre of school or linguistic-literary dialogues for teaching Spanish (Sáez Rivera, 2005, 2012), reflecting the usual tension between mimetic representations of orality and the presentation of a pre-grammaticalized, simplified, and graded form of language that is accessible to learners.
