Ok, so Latin is the base for the Romance languages, it has some concepts that are used in Slavic and Germanic languages (case) but I would hardly call it the “base for anything else.” It’s useful for figuring out words on the SAT, but as a second language it’s, well, just too damn academic. I don’t mean any offense.
My votes would be:
- Spanish
- Chinese, ahem, that is, Mandarin or Cantonese
- Russian
Spanish is relatively easy to learn, and if you live in the States, the practical reasons for learning it are obvious. And there’s plenty of chance for exposure.
The Chinese languages I think will play a very important part in the global economy. There’s not a hell of a whole lot of native English speakers who also speak Chinese, and this would be a very marketable skill to have. Plus the access to a vast culture. And Mandarin is the most spoken language in the world, followed by Spanish, then English. So the numbers are on your side.
And my reasons for Russian are similar to my reasons for Chinese. Large global presence. Millenia of culture, literature, art. Marketable skill.
I also have a theory that dealing with two languages that are quite apart from each other, such as English and Mandarin, or, to a lesser extent, English and Russian, makes it easier to learn new languages in the future and you don’t have preconceived notions of how languages should work. I grew up in a bilingual environment of Polish and English, and this made it easier for me to learn French, German, Croatian and Hungarian (no, no, I’m not fluent in these. just conversationally passable) with little effort because I didn’t try to force these languages to conform to English word formation and sentence structure. I really think this is because I grew up bilingual.
Your daughter is at an age where language acquisition is very quick and natural, and I think it’s great that you want to foster it. But as the other posters said, a video or three won’t do it. She needs to be in an active bilingual environment. It is absolutely AMAZING how fast these kids learn! We had a Kosovar refugee and her kid staying at my friend’s flat here in Hungary, and she had a five-year-old kid who spoke Albanian and Serbian. Within a month or two, she was able to communicate in English with us, just by listening to us talk, and when she went to a Hungarian school, she started picking up Hungarian in a couple of months. They’re like SPONGES! Four or five months and she’s speaking Hungarian naturally in a way I can’t after two and a half years of being here. So do take advantage of it. She’ll thank you at some point.
You may argue that French isn’t as common as Spanish, and it’s certainly not as acedemic as Latin, but well…it’s sexy. And wouldn’t you like your daughter to be able to walk into a room and seduce every straight guy there with just a simple toss of her head, and a French catch phrase or two? (You don’t have to be able to understand French to be taken in.) Oh- and one phrase she’ll want to remember the rest of her life: Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?