So, your original point was not that the teaching of Latin was a huge mistake, but that you got stuck with a crummy class in Latin.
I was taught Latin as a conversational langauge as a high school freshman and by the end of the year, most of my classmates and I could talk it pretty well. The next year, we got a teacher who could only translate written Latin, himself, and so failed to speak it in class and by the end of that year, we had lost a lot of our ability.
I studied Latin all four years in HS. I just checked their site and they still offer Latin. It is a public school in the USA.
ugh. Should read, “If the Latin being taught has NO verbal content, that’s crappy.”
I went to Boston Latin School from 7th-12th grade and Latin was required for the first five of those six years. It’s a public school and I graduated in 1996. I understand the Latin requirement still exists but is less than five years these days.
One of the things that comes up a lot when talking about Latin education is that qualified teachers are dying off or retiring faster than they’re being replaced. Just from that reality, I think we can expect Latin programs to dry up.
There is a traditional approach to teaching Latin as a sort of puzzle-solving system. Advocates of this approach point out that it sharpens the analytical faculties. It’s true that the ability to do hard mental work requires practice, and that traditional approach to Latin is as good a way to get that practice as anything else. But I suspect that it’s mostly people with analytic turns of mind that study Latin to begin with, so the chain of cause-and-effect may be backwards.
I have always lamented that nobody tries to actually speak Latin. Well, as it turns out, people do. There is on the one hand a Living Latin movement that is trying to keep the oral tradition of the language alive. On the other hand, there are educators now coming around to the idea that actually trying to speak the language is a more effective way to teach it. It can be done, and it is being done. Ecce:
Conversational Latin - A video about a teacher using conversational techniques to teach Latin in high school. The teacher speaks mostly in Latin, with subtitles.
Latin Immersion - Here is a video about a program designed to bring people together to actually speak the language.
Conversational Latin for Oral Proficiency - A handy phrase book for having modern conversations in the language of Cicero. The author also did the The Bantam New College Latin & English Dictionary which is not only compact and dirt-cheap, but it’s designed with the Living Latin crowd in mind, with not only many words for modern things, but giving the Latin equivalents to many of the phrases we take for granted in English.
Schola - A social networking site for Latinists. I’ve been in their chatrooms and had conversations with other people of quite different native languages, everybody able to bridge the gap because we shared a knowledge of Latin. Of course, the conversations often end up dealing with the same subjects – where are you from, how long have you been studying Latin, ect. That’s why I’m working on building a Latin vocabulary for D&D, to give people something less awkward to talk about while practicing sentence formation, enunciation and auditory comprehension.
The Latinum Podcast - Since you can’t take a plane to ancient Rome to become immersed in the language, one guy has taken it upon himself to record lessons in spoken Latin so that you can gradually train your ear to understand the language not by hunting down the verb and working backwards, but by being familiar enough to just pick its meaning out of the air as you do with your native language.
Lingua Latina: Per Se Illustrata - This book teaches you Latin, and it’s written entirely in Latin. It teaches you how to read it, and it’s not by any ‘decryption’.
The Latin Wikipedia - The entries are written in Latin, and much of the discussion about them is written in Latin.
I’ve been interested in Latin for years, and studied it by the traditional means with no regret save that it was never something you could have a conversation in. When I discovered how much support there was out there for learning and using Latin as what you call a “real” language, absolutely nothing would do but that I had to get involved.
You could have just studied English vocabulary, too. Even better, you could have studied the derivation of English words from Latin, about which a number of books have been written. The advantage of that is that you would also have been able to analytically decode the meaning of words you’d never seen before. But studying Latin accomplishes all of this with the bonus that you end up knowing Latin.
I went to a Catholic high school (it was a damn sight better than my hometown public HS) and they offered four years of Latin. Not taking it is probably the biggest regret of my high-school career; I should have paid attention to the fact that I kick ass at languages and NOT at physics and calculus and skipped the elective science courses.
Since the OP is really not a General Questions, let’s go to IMHO. Moved.
samclem Moderator, General Questions
I took latin for all four years in high school. The other languages offered were French, Spanish, German, or Japanese.
I chose latin because I lived a block away from the scariest high school in the city and they didn’t offer latin. So–take latin=automatic out of district transfer. I got to go to a nice high school, I loved my latin teacher, and I’ve never regretted taking the class.
A good 25% of the class was cultural education, Roman society, military history, fashion, food, etc. We even went as a class to a Latin Convention once a year. They had costume contests, art galleries, skits, writing competitions, and so on. It also gave a bunch of rather dorky high school kids the chance to run around a hotel with hundreds of other rather dorky high school kids for a weekend. Fun stuff.
Because so much English vocabulary is rooted in Latin, it actually is a pretty useful language. When he takes the SAT, for example, he’ll have a stronger grasp of the vocabulary words than a student who didn’t take Latin. It’s also the basis for Spanish and French; when he takes either language, it’ll be easier for him to learn that vocabulary, as well.
Latin is also the language of law and science. When I took Human Biology, I figured out a lot of the anatomy simply because I understood the Latin names.
My high school didn’t offer it directly, but I was able to take it through a program involving two other area schools. It was a complete waste of time for me.
Since Ladino is a version of Spanish heavily influenced by Hebrew, I find that…difficult to believe. Unless you speak Hebrew?
Yes for me. I took it for 4 years. Got a perfect score on the verbal part of the SATs 
I took Latin myself in High School (class of 1988). I just checked my school’s website and interestingly enough, while they still offer Latin as a Foreign Language choice, they no longer offer German; it’s just French, Spanish and Latin.
I took two years of Spanish and two years of Latin in High School (1986-1989). French, German and Russian were the other offered alternatives. My children’s school offers up to four years of Latin.
Well, not exactly. My Catholic high school (in the late 80s) offered only French and Spanish as foreign languages.
I still teach it. This year we had over 100 kids sign up for Latin 1, and only one kid sign up for German 1 (take that). I am one of three teachers devoted to classical Latin / Ancient Greek / Philosophy and I am in a public school.
actually, it’s become so popular they’re now sending my students to teach it to middle school students in free after school programs.
I am in a relatively blue collar suburb north of Boston, MA, if that helps.
So what do you tell people when you get the usual business – it’s stupid, it’s dead, it doesn’t help with your SAT scores, it’s pretentious, I never got anything out of it therefore nobody else could, ect?
I took it for four years and loved it.
YourAdHere – which school do you teach at? MilliCal took Latin at a school North of Boston, and I’m curious. You can e-mail me through my profile.