I’ve taken a lot of fodder from my friends because not only do I not take a living language, but I’m going to be taking Greek as well as Latin next year, when we get to choose a second language.
Of course, if I go to a living-language teacher (i.e., Spanish, French) and ask what Latin will do for me, they’ll probably say: “Nothing! You should take Spanish/French!”
And then, if I go to my Latin & soon to be Greek teacher and ask what they’ll do for me, they’ll be doing everything under the sun.
So, I ask you, dear impartial Dopers, to please convince me I haven’t made a terrible mistake by taking two dead languages in school!
I think latin has more practical importance. It is the foundation for the romance languages do that is useful if you ever decide to study those as well. Latin by itself is important in law and is still studied for its own purpose in area.
I think Chinese, Japanese and Spanish if you’re American are more useful today than Latin, Greek or French. And I TOOK French :C But really, assuming you’re a white male in a western country, English is all you’re likely to ever need.
I agree with this statement on its face. I once spoke Spanish but no more and I have travelled all over the world. English is remarkably omnipresent.
However, it is not always good enough to settle for good enough in intellectual endeavors. If that were the case, hardly anyone would ever take high school math voluntarily.
I think you can make a pretty good case for Latin being both useful and a good intellectual exercise. For Greek however, let’s just hope you like learning ancient Greek for its own sake.
This is more of an opinion question, but I have to side with your ‘living language’ teachers. There’s just as much discipline and hard work involved in learning French or or Arabic or Japanese, plus you now have a readily usable communication skill. As far as I can tell, the only fields in which Latin and Greek will give you an advantage are in Ancient/Pre-renaissance western history, or possibly archaeology. Even in other fields that occasionally use Latin or Greek (law, for example), knowing them well isn’t really going to give you a huge leg-up.
Disclaimer: I was a language teacher (ESL) and I have language teachers (French) in my family, so I may be biased.
Latin and Greek are practical in the medical fields (including pharmacology) aren’t they?
I took a class in college about the Latin and Greek influences on English language and it greatly improved my understanding of English.
Tell your friends to stuff it. Tell them you are either going to be a doctor or a winning gameshow contestant when you grow up and they will be sorry!!
Another consideration for me is whether I’ll be able to even handle Greek, as I’m studying Russian outside of school as well. It shouldn’t be too much of a problem, though, because I hear Greek isn’t that far removed from Latin. Also, I don’t have to worry that much about not having a “living language” under my belt, but that’s quickly ripsoted by my friends and teachers saying “Colleges/employers don’t count languages taken outside of school!”
So, is that true? And how easy is Greek in comparison to Latin?
I found Greek to be much more difficult than Latin, but that probably had much more to do with the pedagogical styles employed by the various teachers involved.
I studied both Latin and Ancient Greek at school. I loved both subjects. They gave me a wonderful introduction into some of the classics of western literature as well as a thorough grounding in grammar that I have found extremely useful ever since. I don’t regret having studied two “dead” languages at all.
I found Ancient Greek a bit more difficult than Latin, mainly because of the alphabet. Once one gets over that hurdle, it’s not really much harder than Latin.
Add that Greek is vital to the ministry in almost any mainstream church, since exposition of what the Bible actually says depends heavily on the significance of the original text, which is Greek in all the New Testament (the part of most importance to theology, practical hermeneutics, and homiletics) – for examples, see any post on a religious topic by Diogenes and many by tomndebb or myself.
I understand, though I have not done so myself, that a good grounding in Classical Greek makes modern Greek, especially the katharevousa of pre-20th century literature, much easier to learn.
Having gone on to study Medieval/ Renaissance history, I wish very earnestly that I’d studied Latin from an early moment-- the damn language haunts me. What do you plan to do when you grow up? If you’re thinking about serious scholarly work in the humanities it’s a great idea. If not, well. Heck, learn Latin anyway-- someone has to. Or learn Arabic-- that’s academic and historically rich AND isn’t dead.
Yes, that would make things a lot easier. When I have to sing Russian works in the choir I certainly find my knowledge of Ancient Greek helps in pronouncing the words.
No, I don’t think so. I think it’s a bit more complicated than Latin, but not fearsomely so.
Depends what you’re doing. If you’re going to be an academic type (and anyone considering two dead languages has to have it somewhere in their head) there’s a lot more scholarship in many fields written in French than in Spanish, and this is reflected in the language requirements for grad schools. In my department, for instance, we have to be able to read math in two languages of French, German, and Russian. No Spanish to be seen.
As for Latin, it’ll keep your math teacher from wanting to beat your skull in for not being able to see that when he says “cardioid” and you say “heart-shaped thing” you’re talking about the same concept.
One thing Latin definately gives you is an excellent understanding of English grammar - when I took Latin in college, the people who had a hard time with it really didn’t have so much of a hard time with Latin as they did with English. They didn’t have the grammar grounding they needed. And believe it or not, when I went on and took Japanese for a lark, I found Latin was a huge help, structurally. Go figure.
Unless you are really really in tune with your self or have a particularly thought out life plan, anything you happen to decide to take in school could end up being very irrelevant to you how your life turns out.
I took Latin and I loved it. It had a very big “cool” factor for me. All the history that came with it was interesting to me, and when we got to AP (Advanced Placement) Latin, we read an actual piece of literature in Latin (The Aenied). I definitely feel that learning all those latin words helped my English vocabulary, and helped me on my SATs.
That said, later in life I’ve ended up dating a lot of Latinos and it might have made my life a little easier if I had taken Spanish. But based on my current rememberance of Latin and even from my experience of reading some Spanish instructional books more recently, any language you take is not going to help you much unless you are still using it often, either speaking it or reading it, unless you get to a certain level where it’s really innate.
So unless you really know for sure you’re going to need a specific language in the future, just pick whatever language you think you’re going to enjoy learning about, and be satisfied that that’s justification enough.
I almost took Latin in high school, and I’m pretty glad I didn’t. I did study French in high school and Italian in college, and I find that pretty much all the beneficial qualities people attribute to learning Latin–understanding English grammar and being able to identify the roots of words–you can get easily from studying a living Romance language. Plus you end up with a pragmatically useful skill.
I work at a translation company now, and we see all kinds of languages coming through our doors. We have some employees here who I imagine were much like you when they were in high school, like a guy who speaks (as far as I know–I might be missing a few): French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Turkish, Greek, Russian… all of these to a level of fluency where he can perform linguistic QA on our translated documents, with the aid of a dictionary. My work at this job has proved to me that you really don’t need to study one of the “major” languages like Chinese or French to get plenty of work in the real world–in fact, it’s probably easier for our Lithuanian linguists to hold their jobs because we can’t replace them as easily as, say, a Spanish translator–but it seems pretty damn hard to get a job using Latin or ancient Greek outside of an academic setting.
You’ll have to do just as much work either way–in my opinion, you might as well study something that gives you twice as much benefit in practical results. Plus, there was just such a thrill when I stepped off a plane in Paris for the first time and heard French all around me, and got to practice my language skills in a real setting. Romance philology conferences and SCA meetings aside, you’ll never get that same feeling with Latin, nor will you be able to keep your language skills honed by renting a Latin movie every week from Netflix. (Although I guess you could attend Mass.)