[artzmeister]

There is benefit to all in learning Latin. I cannot explain it, it's one of those things you just have to experience.

Not to mention that it will become a gateway drug... Attic Greek, Sanskrit, Syriac, Aramaic... I don't know them just yet, but Latin makes me want to learn it all!

Nice article.

[ajmurmann]

I think Latin, like so many things, gets taught in school to people who are too young to appreciate it. Latin in school was mostly a nuisance to me. The only students who got really into it were those that took it as an additional elective later. I now wished I had made more of an effort in the Latin class. That said, even now I study languages in my spare time but choose once that are currently in use.

[low_tech_love]

Sure, but if I may digress a bit, don’t fool yourself into thinking that if you had paid more attention to the lessons you would actually have learned more. You might, but maybe not as much as you think. As a teacher myself, I believe that people put too much weight and unfair expectations on the formal process of learning, especially in the classical structure we have in most schools/universities.

It goes something like “I need to learn X; let me take a course on that, surely this will do it.” But then two things happen: the feeling that, by taking the course, you are doing what needs to be done in order to learn, you get lazy and sit back and expect it to happen passively. It won’t. Second, your teacher might not actually be very good, which is fine (most of us have no idea what constitutes “good teaching” in any repeatable way) and might give you lessons and assignments that may be more of a waste of time than anything else.

My point is: if you want to learn something, just go and do it. Odds are you are probably doing better than if you were in a course. If you are doing a course, then consider it as “time slot allocated to X” and try to be as independent and proactive as you can; it is much better than relying on a teacher.

[artzmeister]

I agree. When in school, I had very little interest for learning English and Spanish, or languages in general. Now, with newfound maturity and curiosity, I'd like to learn lots of them and about them.

There is also the issue of approach: learning the grammar of a foreign tongue before the rest is tedious and will bring kids very little. If, however, you learn my immersion and naturally, then you are sure to be hooked. That's how I learned English anyway, on my own.

[thequadehunter]

Same with me. Dad is Mexican and I took Spanish because I thought he could just help me every time I got stuck. At 15 years old it did not occur to me what a wasted opportunity it was that he never taught me.

I ended up learning Japanese later in life through tons of immersion and living in the country, and knowing what I know now I wish I could have explained how important bilingualism is to 15 year old me...or even my dad. It is the single most eye-opening thing I've ever done. Something about it just makes you so much more cognoscente about everything you say and do even in your native language. It's like I "came online" or something.

[thaumasiotes]

My father's mother was Mexican.

When I was born, my mother specifically requested that she teach me to speak Spanish. She refused to do so; when her own children were born, she had been forbidden from teaching them Spanish.

[euroderf]

After learning Latin in junior high, picking up French in high school was preposterously easy.

[agumonkey]

the few latin vocabular and grammar i knew tickled my brain in funny ways, it kinda make you think slightly differently

[marginalia_nu]

Learning almost anything sufficiently new will do that to you. Dabble in calligraphy and letters will never quite look the same again. Get into dance or poetry and you'll appreciate entirely new nuances to music.

[agumonkey]

other skills don't alter the way to analyze and describe the world. it's more like going from arithmetic to calculus.. suddenly you see new insights

[marginalia_nu]

Literally every skill I mentioned does exactly that. It's very palpable, like the world gains additional colors.

[artzmeister]

There is some element of truth to what they said, though. Not to take away from these other examples, but it is more than seeing new nuances, as in, it can become an entirely new paradigm of thinking. In English, things feel very limited and strict, and your expressiveness (so I find, at least) has an upper limit. With something like Latin, you can express more, with less, and in completely new ways that you would not think about at all in English.

There is more to this argument, but this is a good start, I think.

[marginalia_nu]

Right, but thinking is just one aspect of our experience of the world.

Skills, in a broader sense expand how and what you experience. Language does this to how we experience communication and expression. Reading in general does this too, but in different ways.

Like how you can't hear a word you know without understanding its meaning, expanded beyond language.

[agumonkey]

no, we're not talking about the same thing, language is more general than calligraphy or even music

[marginalia_nu]

The experience of the world is more general than language, is what changes.

[LoganDark]

I think it's just that you are the type of person to learn Latin :)

[artzmeister]

Hehe could be :)

[triyambakam]

Do you have any resources to recommend?

[artzmeister]

For sure! The book that gets the most amount of praise and the one I personally used and can highly recommend is `Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata Pars I: Familia Romana` or LLPSI, for short.

It is a "natural method" book, which means it teaches you the language using the language itself. This may seem hard and counter-intuitive, but it starts off really easily, with sentences that just about anyone could understand, and there are images to help you visualize things. The advantage of this method is that it teaches you an intuitive understanding of the language, as if you were learning by immersion. That is how humans generally learn languages: we don't think of grammar when we read or speak, we just do it.

That isn't to say you won't learn grammar, but rather, it means that grammar will be a complement, not your main focus. For grammar-related queries, Allen & Greenough's dictionary is a really good one. You can find it hosted online by the Dickinson College.

As a dictionary, there are the Latinitium ones, which are really good, and serve Latin to English as well as the contrary. For support and to see what other Latinistas are up to, there is the Latin & Ancient Greek discord server (sorry, I don't have the link on me right now), and from there you can join the LLPSI one.

What I did was to read a bit every day of either LLPSI I & II or some more advanced books when I was able to for about a year and a half. Now, I can read a lot by Cicero and some other authors. It's well worth it :)

Happy learning!

[billfruit]

What I'd recommend is the standard Latin text book in the USA, the Wheelock.

[EdwardDiego]

I feel like if I'd paid more attention in 3rd form Latin, learning German grammar would've been a bit easier.