[tomclive]

Yep, I'll agree with this. I studied Latin for about 8 years at school and enjoyed it, even though at the time I had thought it pretty useless.

15 years later I moved to Spain for a while and was amazed at how naturally everything came together. Within a very short time, I was able to make sense of written Spanish.

Conversationally, not so much but I'm sure the Latin helped.

[ben_w]

Likewise, I have never learned Spanish, but when I saw a Zika-related public service advert on the NY subway when visiting the USA, I could read it easily. (Native English, plus Duolingo German and Esperanto which I estimate as A2 and A1 respectively)

[Iwan-Zotow]

> Zika-related public service advert on the NY subway

Virus is advertising itself as public service on the NY subway?!

Wow!

[noblethrasher]

My Latin teacher often reminded us that ”Spanish is just lazy Latin“.

[silverbax88]

That's a common statement but somewhat inaccurate, as it omits the fact that what most of us think of as Spanish is Castillian, which has a heavy influence from Arabic languages.

[tolger]

Spanish native speaker here. The influence from Arabic is mostly in vocabulary, about 10% of our words have Arabic roots. However, Arabic had negligible influence in structure and grammar. Spanish is your standard Latin derived language.

[JoeDaDude]

As a fluent Spanish speaker, I won't go that far, but now that I am learning Latin, I am amazed how easy it seems. As an aside, I can understand ~80% of spoken Portuguese and maybe ~50% of Italian.