[2] The popularity of his works and the fact that French copyright law did not apply in Frankfurt am Main led to pirated copies being printed in that city by the publishing house Carl Jügel (under the name of Charles Jugel at the German and Foreign Library).
In 1850 Ollendorff brought a legal case against a London bookseller, Alexander Black, for importing pirated copies of one of his books purported to have been printed in Frankfurt am Main.
[3] In 1898 Antonin Nantel's Nouveau cours de langue anglaise selon la méthode d'Ollendorff à l'usage des écoles, académies, pensionnats et colléges, an English primer based on the Ollendorff method was published by the Montreal publisher Librairie Beauchemin for use in French-speaking schools in Canada.
That work was designed for French, and Ollendorff was keen to see it adopted for other modern and classical languages.
In the 1840s Ollendorff also wrote the first[citation needed] post-Renaissance textbook for conversational Latin, the Nouvelle méthode pour apprendre, à lire, a écrire et à parler une langue en six mois, appliquée au Latin.
Ollendorff's French text contains little on grammar, and is almost entirely intuitive, with learning based on practice alone, not theory.
Manesca had written:[5] If I have not spoken of the advantages that may be derived from the present mode of teaching applied to dead languages, it is not because I entertain the smallest doubt of its efficacy in that particular; for, on the contrary, I am confident that many years of toilsome, tedious, and almost fruitless labours, would be saved by the adoption of such a method for these languages.
Such a consideration well deserves the attention of the few scholars competent for a task which would prove so beneficial to the present and future generation of collegiate students.
It is high time that a rational, uniform method should be adopted.The French-Latin Ollendorff was, as far as can be ascertained, the first[citation needed] textbook written in modern times aimed at teaching Latin as a spoken language, using "modern" methods.
Manesca's method was never translated directly into Latin or Greek for publication, although it did appear in a Spanish edition written by Carlos Rabadan.
The Ollendorff version went through several editions, and was quite popular for private pupils, but it was never taken up by schools for teaching Latin.
Adler's American edition seems to have suffered the same fate, and original copies of it are very hard to come by, although it is now available as a reprint.
They also use artificially constructed sentences, which, while illustrating grammar and tense well enough, are extremely unlikely to occur in real life.
In Chapter XXX of his Roughing It (1872), a memoir of his years in Nevada and California, he writes:[11] Before leaving Carson, the Secretary and I had purchased 'feet' from various Esmeralda stragglers.
We had expected immediate returns of bullion, but were only afflicted with regular and constant 'assessments' instead—demands for money wherewith to develop the said mines.
I bought a horse and started, in company with Mr. Ballou and a gentleman named Ollendorff, a Prussian—not the party who has inflicted so much suffering on the world with his wretched foreign grammars, with their interminable repetitions of questions which never have occurred and are never likely to occur in any conversation among human beings.
"Ah," said the Grand Duke, "if you had, I'd have come and wrung your neck like a chicken, and scattered you to the four corners of this dressing-room."
"I have not read that paper on the looking-glass," replied Clarence, whose chief fault as a conversationalist was that he was perhaps a shade too Ollendorfian.