I would absolutely agree with this. Before I took Latin, I had no idea what a gerund was, or what the ablative or dative cases were, but I do now. I usually can easily get the grasp of passages written in Romance languages - obviously not the exact meaning, but generally what it means. Our HS Latin also included a lot of stuff about the Romans, which turned me on to the Asterix comics, and made it possible for me to really enjoy HBO’s Rome this season.
Plus I scored off the charts on the SAT verbal section. Knowing those Latin and Greek roots will do wonders for your vocabulary. Pax vobiscum!
My BIL took Latin and was very glad. Later, he learned Spanish by immersion and found that much easier because of his background.
I’m all for studying Latin if you can; I’m constantly wishing I knew some. (I am fixing this by studying Latin with my kid. We’ll probably do Greek later, talk about cool.) For all of the reasons listed above, pretty much: basis for learning other languages, English grammar, mental discipline, SAT pwning, and so on. You might enjoy reading this essay by Dorothy Sayers about her own Latin education and how it could have been improved. The host site is one that sells Latin curriculum for home study, and has tons of articles about why Latin is the best thing ever (in case you want to read them), but this one is my favorite.
I studied German and Russian, and speak fluent Danish. Latin would have been more useful than any of those. I enjoyed them a lot though, and now like Russian movies even though I can only remember a few words, so I’m not complaining or anything, just saying that Latin is useful even if dead. Utility is not the first measure of why we should learn something anyhow!
Not entirely dead. I’ve been in situations where I’ve had conversations (admittedly simple ones) in Latin because it’s been the only language I’ve had in common with the other person
This is total bull! The way to learn English grammar is to study English. I still remember the day my daughter was reading about English one day and asked whether a noun was the same thing as what in French was called a “nom”. When I went to school (you know, in the good old days), we were actually grammar including sentence parsing; this long since has disappeared. But not in French teaching.
There seems to be a persistent perception that Latin grammaer is somehow “perfect” and to learn the grammar of any other language, you have to fit it into the mold of Latin. So English is said to have six tenses, including the imperfect and perfect, which I call the simple and compound. However, the simple past is the one with perfective meaning and the compound has basically imperfect (more precisely continuitive) meaning.
Anyway, a proper grammar of English would say that it has two tenses, a “present” (which is really timeless) and a past. All other temporal meanings are conveyed by auxiliaries. There is no reason, for example, to single out the “will” future as the future and relegate, say, the “going to” future as a periphrastic phrase. They are both ways of experssing futurity and there are others.
To get back to the OP, the real question is whether you wish to study ancient languages because you wish to or for more vocational reasons. If the former, go for it!. Vocationally, I would recommend an oriental language (Chinese of Japanese) since you are young enough to deal with learning really exotic languages. Spanish and French are very easy by comparison, but you sound like someone for whom language learning comes easy. Don’t worry about the Latin used in the law and medicine. There are set phrases you will learn while studying the subjects that you will pick up. As one example, every mathematician understands QED, whether or not he knows the Latin phrase or what it means.
I have read one polyglot who is fluent in over 100 languages who said that the first dozen or so were the hardest; after that it was easy. For me, I would rather have my nails extracted with a pliers than have to learn a language, which illustrates how modular the brain is. But I wish I could learn languages easily. If you can, do everything you can to develop the facility.
How good is Latin/Greek for a High School Education?
Depends.
If you plan on studying classical languages in order to further your career, you’ll want to think twice. Jobs requiring this kind of knowledge are few and far between outside of academia. Sure, it may be useful in the medical field, but is hardly crucial. And from what I’ve been told (though IANAL) attorneys who actually understand Latin instead of just having memorized a few terms they will mispronounce for the rest of their professional lives are few and far in between.
If, on the other hand, you are a word nerd / logophile / bibliovore – the sort of person who thinks etymologies are fun – having a grounding in the classical languages is like finding the keys to the candy store. Yes, by the way, I fall into this category. Ever had the experience of seeing a word you’re never encountered before and knowing exactly what it means? Or better yet, “inventing” a new word and having others understand it instantly? There are few better ways to build your vocabulary, and to increase your understanding of what words really mean, than to study Greek and Latin.
And may I respectfully disagree with the above stated opinion of Hari Seldon? When I began studying Latin in college, it was as if the blinders had been torn from my eyes, and I really started to feel that I understood what I had failed to grasp in my previous twelve tortuous years of English instruction. No, Latin is hardly perfect. But the Enlightenment thinkers who were the first to codify the rules of English grammar certainly thought so, and artificially grafted a number of its rules into English – rules that continue to torment schoolkids to this very day. Of course individual experiences will vary, but I have even seen two or three books on English grammar that were written specifically for those who have studied Latin. The study of Latin and Greek may not appear on my resume, but it certainly has helped to make me a more proficient communicator.
I am an English speaker and live in a Spanish speaking country but find that a majority of my Spanish speaking acquaintences speak English fluently. I almost never need to speak Spanish with anyone that I know. The children all learn English in their schools and it is becoming the language of choice among them. I think that sometime in the not too near future, the English language will become the primary language of this country. Even TV has many English language programs. The newspaper, however, clings to Spanish. Many stores now have English language names on them.
Chill out a bit. I parsed the statement as “I learned about structural grammar from Latin, which I was then able to apply to English and fill in the gaps left from the fact that they don’t teach a damn bit of grammar in grammar school anymore.”