# Final high school exams (NSW) - the ten most popular languages **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [October 20, 2009, 1:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423 "2009-10-20T01:30:07Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Kyla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/eada6e/32.png) [@Kyla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kyla)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 5:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/41 "2009-10-22T05:21:20Z")
> [@FlyingRamenMonster](#): > > We don’t really have “good universities” here - that is to say, some schools are held in higher regard than others, and some are considered jokes, but the vast majority of students go to university in their own state. If you wanted to go to school in Sydney or Melbourne instead, you could, but we don’t have an ultra-competitive Ivy League equivalent. Even the top schools would accept you if you had the grades and exam results. You don’t have to do exactly the right classes and have a 4+ GPA and be on the rowing team and help donate puppies to Africa. That’s interesting. Thanks for sharing that. Sounds nice, honestly, not to have so much pressure to take the right classes and have the right extracurriculars, etc., etc., etc. ---
**Author:** ![Cunctator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/43a26b/32.png) [@Cunctator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cunctator)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 5:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/42 "2009-10-22T05:21:37Z")
> [@Kyla](#): > > This is interesting. While this is technically similar to how it works in the US (or at least in California), in reality, you need to take a lot of specific classes to get into a good university. It’s possible the details have altered in minor ways since 1996 when I graduated high school, but for instance, you only have to take two years of math to graduate, but to get into the University of California, you have to take three years, and they _recommend_ you take four years. You don’t need to take _any_ foreign language to graduate high school, but the University of California requires a minimum of two years, and if you don’t take three years, you have to take an additional year when you actually get there. > > Is that not the case for being accepted to a good university in Australia? As **FlyingRamenMonster** said, universities in Australia aren’t really ranked quite as rigidly as they are in the US. Some of the older, longer established ones (e.g. the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne) carry a bit of extra prestige, but only with respect to certain faculties. Newer universities would carry a little less prestige. However I know that when we recruit graduates, we concentrate on the results that the graduate has achieved. We don’t care about the uni. And the vast bulk of students go to a uni that’s in their home city/state anyway. And as for getting a place at uni - for most undergraduate degrees it’s generally determined solely by your final results in the HSC exams (or equivalent in other states). Some courses (such as engineering) may require that the student has completed certain subjects e.g. maths. But generally there aren’t any prerequisites. I got into my first degree (Economics/Actuarial Studies) without having studied economics at school. ---
**Author:** ![Kyla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/eada6e/32.png) [@Kyla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kyla)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 5:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/43 "2009-10-22T05:36:53Z")
> [@Cunctator](#): > > And as for getting a place at uni - for most undergraduate degrees it’s generally determined solely by your final results in the HSC exams (or equivalent in other states). Some courses (such as engineering) may require that the student has completed certain subjects e.g. maths. But generally there aren’t any prerequisites. I got into my first degree (Economics/Actuarial Studies) without having studied economics at school. I’m a little confused by your terminology here (specifically, what “at school” means). Do you mean that you hadn’t studied economics in high school before you studied it in university? Because that doesn’t strike me as odd at all. My bachelor’s degree is in anthropology. As anthropology is not a typical subject taught in high school, I’m sure it not surprising that I never took any classes in it prior to starting university. The prerequisites I was mentioning earlier in the US system don’t have anything to do with your college major - they’re just prerequisites for entrance for _all_ students, no matter what they are planning on studying. They don’t require that you’ve taken XYZ in high school to study ABC in college. Anyway, could you really just take easy classes and avoid whatever you didn’t like and still get into a university? I’m just a little blown away by this. I’m terrible at math and would have loved to drop it and take more English or French or…whatever, anything, but I had to take four years of it so I could get into a good school after high school. ---
**Author:** ![FlyingRamenMonster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@FlyingRamenMonster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FlyingRamenMonster)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 6:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/44 "2009-10-22T06:08:45Z")
Once again I’m only speaking for WA here, but you could take easy classes if you wanted, but all the TEE subjects were considered reasonably to very challenging. You could if you wanted to take the minimum of four TEE subjects and two blow-off subjects to fill out your course but serious students didn’t tend to do this, because your final ranking is calculated using the average score of your four or five best subjects (so if you took 6 TEE subjects and didn’t do well on one or two, they wouldn’t factor into your ranking, but if you only do four you’d better be damn confident about your marks). A lot of courses required a TEE math class, though, so in that case you’d have to do at least applicable math and introductory calculus. On the other hand, if you really hate math that much you probably wouldn’t be doing a math-related course in uni in which case yes, you could get into uni without doing TEE maths. One important difference between our system and the American system is that you don’t apply to schools, you apply to their individual departments for the course you want to study. We also don’t have a foundation year - when I started doing design at my university, we did learn basic design concepts in our first year before choosing our major but we didn’t have to take any English, math, history etc classes. It was all design, all the time. I never got why they did that in the US, anyway - isn’t that what high school is for? ---
**Author:** ![Cunctator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/43a26b/32.png) [@Cunctator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cunctator)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 6:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/45 "2009-10-22T06:21:00Z")
> [@Kyla](#): > > I’m a little confused by your terminology here (specifically, what “at school” means). Do you mean that you hadn’t studied economics in high school before you studied it in university? Yes, ‘at school’ means at high school. The term ‘school’ in Australia refers only to compulsory primary and secondary education, for children. We don’t use the term ‘school’ to refer to optional, tertiary education at university. > [@Kyla](#): > > Anyway, could you really just take easy classes and avoid whatever you didn’t like and still get into a university? I’m just a little blown away by this. I’m terrible at math and would have loved to drop it and take more English or French or…whatever, anything, but I had to take four years of it so I could get into a good school after high school. In theory yes. But also, the underlying theory of the HSC is that all the subjects are equally ‘hard’, since they’re testing the students after 12 years of schooling in that subject. Some of my best friends at (high) school studied only humanities in their final two HSC years: English, Latin, French, History etc and then went on to graduate in law. They didn’t do any maths, because it’s not a compulsory HSC subject. Would you consider that they did only ‘soft’ subjects? Some of them achieved final HSC results that would also have secured them a university place studying something like Engineering. But without maths, they’d never have passed the first year courses in Engineering. And anyway, as **FlyingRamenMonster** points out, if they disliked maths so much that they avoided it at school, they would never have been applying for places at uni in courses that required maths. ---
**Author:** ![FlyingRamenMonster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@FlyingRamenMonster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FlyingRamenMonster)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 6:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/46 "2009-10-22T06:25:34Z")
Oh, and the way our system worked was they had “list 1” and “list 2” subjects, with list 1 being arts/humanities and list 2 being math/science. So you didn’t _have_ to do math, but if you wanted to go to uni you’d have to do chemistry or something to make up for it. Not sure if they still make the distinction. ---
**Author:** ![bengangmo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/50afbb/32.png) [@bengangmo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bengangmo)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 8:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/47 "2009-10-22T08:52:05Z")
> [@nashiitashii](#): > > I’m not entirely sure how native speakers are being allowed to take what I’m assuming is a beginner/intermediate level course in their own language-- it’s not helpful for them, is giving the other students who take it a much lower chance of actually passing the course [due to the grading curve created by 50%+ native speakers], and is potentially keeping them from meeting some sort of actual accomplishment that the rule of “take a foreign language” requires. > In some cases, the policy isn’t strict enough, but having people take language proficiency exams before taking the class (to sort people out) wouldn’t do a whole lot either-- one can easily fake not knowing the material if they’re a native speaker. Personally, unless they’re learning the writing aspect of the language for the first time, behavior like this makes me think of the people doing it as incredibly academically lazy. Then again, I am strongly for having separate classes for native speakers of a language who are not literate or strongly literate in that language-- it’s a good way to make language learning more fair for all groups of learners. > > **RNATB** : I didn’t know that most people still used that. I’ve only ever used it in context of my own family, and even then, it was with people I was closer to-- I wouldn’t dare use it to describe anyone else in passing. “native speakers” weren’t allowed to take the class, but those that had Chinese as a mother tongue / cradle language could not be singled out though. That’s one thing that stands out for me about the Chinese as a culture, I find that they tend to maintain Chinese cultural identity a lot more than I saw other cultures doing growing up - and in particular speaking the mother tongue was one part of this. Not sure about the writing profiency part - but I do know that at age 5 my daughter can already write more characters than I could at the end of my one year of Chinese. ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 9:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/48 "2009-10-22T09:52:03Z")
> [@Kyla](#): > > I think being able to put “intermediate ability in spoken and written Russian” on my resume will be a really tangible benefit for my career If it’s anything like having “intermediate ability” in Chinese, then pardon me while I fall down laughing. Being able to order restaurant dishes and talk about movies in a foreign language won’t do much for ya, son. Again, speaking from my experience with Chinese: until you can read a newspaper or business report quickly without turning to a dictionary for every fifth word, then intermediate ability in a language is an interesting little multicultural brownie point that might get thirty seconds worth of discussion in a job interview before turning to the _real_ questions relating of “what can you do for me now?” After all, if the ability to speak Chinese is a critical aspect of the job, why shouldn’t they simply hire someone from China? Sorry, don’t mean to bust ya bubble, but being middle aged and experienced means you get to gripe about these things. ---
**Author:** ![Martini\_Enfield](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/martini_enfield/32/11123_2.png) [@Martini\_Enfield](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martini_Enfield)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 12:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/49 "2009-10-22T12:37:20Z")
When I was at High School in NZ, your Foreign Language Options were: A) French B) Japanese C) German D) _Maybe_ Mandarin Chinese, But Probably Not. I took four years of French and it’s been very, very useful in my travels- the last time I was in Mexico, for example, I could read all the signs and notices, which was fascinating. I’ll chime in with the other Aussies and say that we don’t have “Ivy League” universities here for the most part- there are some Universities that have a reputation for being specialists in a particular field (QUT and Bond University both have well-respected Law schools, for example) but _generally_ a degree from one University here is as good as the same degree from another. It’s also worth bearing in mind that the State and Federal Governments keep a pretty close eye on Universities and their teaching standards, and you’ve got to be specially accredited by the Government to call yourself a “University”. ---
**Author:** ![Kyla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/eada6e/32.png) [@Kyla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kyla)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 12:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/50 "2009-10-22T12:45:59Z")
> [@Koxinga](#): > > If it’s anything like having “intermediate ability” in Chinese, then pardon me while I fall down laughing. Being able to order restaurant dishes and talk about movies in a foreign language won’t do much for ya, son. No offense, and I don’t know your Chinese abilities, but I strongly suspect I’ll be able to accomplish more, and more quickly in Russian, than you are in Chinese. I speak fluent Bulgarian, which is fairly closely related to Russian, and am so far finding it extremely easy. (With very, very little studying, the lowest grade I’ve gotten on any test or quiz is a 95.) When I said “intermediate”, I was imaging a lot more skills that being able to order in a restaurant or chat about movies. BTW, I don’t know what line of work you’re in, but language skills are important in mine (international development). There is no way having that background won’t help me out. Also, I have to say that I’m not a huge fan of being called _son_. **Cunctator** and **Flying Ramen Monster** , thanks for the explanations. I think we’ve hit on the difference between the US and Australian university systems. The US liberal arts college ideal is that all students be “well-rounded”, so it would be seen as quite a poor reflection on you as a student to only take humanities, even if they were all very challenging. Almost all universities in the US require that students fulfill a core of general education requirements that often have nothing to do with one’s main course of study. My university required that _everyone_, irrespective of major, took at least two introductory-level humanities classes, two science classes, two social science classes, and then a topical class in each category as well (so, an introductory social science course would be like, Introduction to Psychology, but then as a topical course you could take Psychology of Religion, which was still lower-division and had no prerequisites), AND a few other random requirements, too, once of which was a quantitative course. I took Introduction to Astronomy, which fulfilled both one of my introductory science courses and my quantitative requirement, and then a theoretical physics class for my topical science course. Sometimes these classes are kind of a joke, just easy things so people are bad at math can complete the requirement, but I liked my science classes. ---
**Author:** ![Martini\_Enfield](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/martini_enfield/32/11123_2.png) [@Martini\_Enfield](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martini_Enfield)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/51 "2009-10-22T14:06:31Z")
> [@Kyla](#): > > **Cunctator** and **Flying Ramen Monster** , thanks for the explanations. I think we’ve hit on the difference between the US and Australian university systems. The US liberal arts college ideal is that all students be “well-rounded”, so it would be seen as quite a poor reflection on you as a student to only take humanities, even if they were all very challenging. Almost all universities in the US require that students fulfill a core of general education requirements that often have nothing to do with one’s main course of study. My university required that _everyone_, irrespective of major, took at least two introductory-level humanities classes, two science classes, two social science classes, and then a topical class in each category as well (so, an introductory social science course would be like, Introduction to Psychology, but then as a topical course you could take Psychology of Religion, which was still lower-division and had no prerequisites), AND a few other random requirements, too, once of which was a quantitative course. I took Introduction to Astronomy, which fulfilled both one of my introductory science courses and my quantitative requirement, and then a theoretical physics class for my topical science course. Sometimes these classes are kind of a joke, just easy things so people are bad at math can complete the requirement, but I liked my science classes. This is quite an interesting difference between our two countries’ university systems- in fact, as I mentioned in a similar current thread on the subject, you generally _can’t_ take “unrelated” subjects here at undergraduate university level without an extremely good reason and a dispensation from the Course Convenor. Universities here are generally geared towards getting you a job from your degree- becoming a “well-rounded person” is something you can do in your own time if you’re that way inclined, for the most part. ---
**Author:** ![Kyla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/eada6e/32.png) [@Kyla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kyla)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/52 "2009-10-22T14:42:49Z")
> [@Martini\_Enfield](#): > > This is quite an interesting difference between our two countries’ university systems- in fact, as I mentioned in a similar current thread on the subject, you generally _can’t_ take “unrelated” subjects here at undergraduate university level without an extremely good reason and a dispensation from the Course Convenor. How long does it usually take to get a BA, then? I feel like it must be less time than in the US. ---
**Author:** ![Martini\_Enfield](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/martini_enfield/32/11123_2.png) [@Martini\_Enfield](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martini_Enfield)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 2:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/53 "2009-10-22T14:45:16Z")
> [@Kyla](#): > > How long does it usually take to get a BA, then? I feel like it must be less time than in the US. Three years, usually. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 2:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/54 "2009-10-22T14:49:53Z")
> [@Kyla](#): > > How long does it usually take to get a BA, then? I feel like it must be less time than in the US. It is. 3 years in the UK, too, though most people take a “gap year” where they travel the world or feed the homeless or work a minimum-wage job that pays just enough to cover dope. ---
**Author:** ![Kyla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/eada6e/32.png) [@Kyla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kyla)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/55 "2009-10-22T14:57:03Z")
_Most_ people take a gap year? I’d be curious to see that statistics on that. Yeah. That is shorter. A standard BA in the US takes 4 years, although it’s not uncommon to take 5 years, especially if you switch majors or something. ---
**Author:** ![nashiitashii](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/7c8e57/32.png) [@nashiitashii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nashiitashii)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/56 "2009-10-22T15:02:30Z")
> [@Kyla](#): > > > [@Miller](#): > > > > I did. Two years of Spanish, two years of Latin. Spanish may have been more useful, but Latin was a hell of a lot more fun. > > But you didn’t take them at the same time, did you? I did this with German and French, and had three semesters in high school where the two languages overlapped. It wasn’t that bad. > [@bengangmo](#): > > “native speakers” weren’t allowed to take the class, but those that had Chinese as a mother tongue / cradle language could not be singled out though. That’s one thing that stands out for me about the Chinese as a culture, I find that they tend to maintain Chinese cultural identity a lot more than I saw other cultures doing growing up - and in particular speaking the mother tongue was one part of this. > Not sure about the writing profiency part - but I do know that at age 5 my daughter can already write more characters than I could at the end of my one year of Chinese. I guess instead of “native speakers” I should have used “people whose families speak [X language] with them at home”, as some of them would not necessarily be fluent, even with regular familial interaction in said language. I find that, though it may not necessarily be evident with the Chinese speakers that you know, I have met several native speakers of languages other than English (who also speak English) who are illiterate in their other language. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 3:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/57 "2009-10-22T15:07:06Z")
> [@Kyla](#): > > _Most_ people take a gap year? I’d be curious to see that statistics on that. In the UK, yes, though I can only find [statistics for _pre_-university gap years](http://www.gapadvice.org/young-people/facts-figures/) (elected by 24% of students, give or take). Nobody seems to bother tracking 2nd- or 3rd-year gap leavers, which is what my brother did… possibly because it’s difficult to track actual gap years as opposed to people who are supposedly taking a gap year but really just dropping out. The numbers might also have changed a bit now that university isn’t free. [QUOTE=nashitashii] I did this with German and French, and had three semesters in high school where the two languages overlapped. It wasn’t that bad. [/QUOTE] Ha! I did it with French, Spanish and Latin, and it wasn’t even by choice- and now I can’t do anything but read in any of the three. ---
**Author:** ![Martini\_Enfield](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/martini_enfield/32/11123_2.png) [@Martini\_Enfield](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martini_Enfield)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 3:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/58 "2009-10-22T15:09:14Z")
> [@Kyla](#): > > _Most_ people take a gap year? I’d be curious to see that statistics on that. It’s certainly a common enough occurrence here that it’s been a major factor in the row over the Government’s plans to change Youth Allowance entitlements and eligibilities, FWIW. In New Zealand it was very common to take a year off after High School and do an “O.E.” (Overseas Experience), which typically involved working in a London pub or an American/Canadian ski field for a year, with lots of sightseeing and backpacker-y type stuff thrown in. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Angel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d26b3c/32.png) [@Johnny\_Angel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Angel)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/59 "2009-10-22T19:05:39Z")
[QUOTE=Kyla] The argument that Latin helps you learn Romance languages strikes me as bizarre - you know what else helps you learn Spanish and Italian? Studying Spanish or Italian. Hell, I took Spanish, and then when I decided to teach myself French, I found my Spanish background immensely useful. No Latin necessary. [/quote] Latin is the ur-language that unites a lot of languages used in the west. If it’s true, as is claimed on Wikipedia, that the study of [Interlingua](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua) helps one puzzle through Spanish better than the same amount of time spent actually studying Spanish, then Latin would be at least that useful, since Interlingua is basically Latin without inflectional endings. It has also been mentioned that Latin helps with learning biological nomenclature. Of course, you can also just study the nomenclature by itself. Most do. Those, however, don’t end up learning much about Latin. The person who studies Latin, on the other hand, gets way out ahead in the study of scientific nomenclature and is in the enviable position of not merely memorizing, but understanding. Note that this advantage is cumulative with the advantage discussed above. Latin is often cited as a good way to build up verbal scores in standardized tests, and not without [evidence](http://www.promotelatin.org/WhyStudyLatin2003.pdf). But in fact, it simply stands to reason. 60% of English words come from Latin, and that jumps to 80% when you look at words of three or more syllables. How many syllables on average are you expecting per word in the SAT? Furthermore, those English words from Latin mean what they mean because of morphological rules that are not themselves carried over into English morphology, so English doesn’t teach you how to decode them. You can just study the English vocabulary directly, but the same amount of effort in Latin vocabulary plus derivational rules yields a rich English vocabulary as well. It’s also possible to just study the cheat sheet on Latin derivation, which will certainly help. But you won’t get any of the advantages mentioned in the previous two paragraphs, which are cumulative. Latin is also a highly ordered and logical language, and is traditionally promoted as part of a complete curriculum that exercises rational faculties. Of course, you can and should study logic itself as well as mathematics and rhetoric. But it’s not as though the advantages of all these approaches to analytic training don’t stack. They are cumulative with those of Latin, which includes all the above discussed advantages as a free bonus. It’s true that you don’t come out of a Latin class with the ability to communicate with living people (ignoring for the moment that the spoken Latin community is growing now that the internet is here to connect them). But let’s not pretend that high schools are cranking out fluent second language speakers either. You can parlay your halting high school French into continuing studies, but most people don’t. They let it wither and fade, and the advantage in principle that it’s an actual living language is rarely an advantage in fact. The opportunity cost for that advantage that never manifested is all the things above that Latin teaches you, which are cumulative. Latin builds a diverse intellectual portfolio which pays reliable dividends however the market changes. Modern languages are high-yield investments with little liquidity. ---
**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 7:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423/60 "2009-10-22T19:39:50Z")
> [@Kyla](#): > > But you didn’t take them at the same time, did you? I took 4 years of French and 3 years of Spanish so I ended up studying both at the same time in grades 10-12. I wanted to take both freshman year, but the guidence counselor wouldn’t let me. Granted in practice French III and French IV were the same class because there weren’t enough students interested to have seperate classes (my French III consisted 6 juniors and the one girl who took French IV). In theory Mme X was supposed to give the IVs additional course work, but in practice we all did the same stuff. Next year 3 of us from French III took French IV (which we shared with French III). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/final-high-school-exams-nsw-the-ten-most-popular-languages/514423.md?page=4)