Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Latin is very useful if you ever meet a really old Roman.

It is also very useful for the SAT and ACT.

So is Italian, Spanish, Romanian, and French.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:At what public school do they teach this useless language?

Latin is not useless. It is very useful if you go into medicine. It is also helpful for knowing more about languages, English and Romance languages.

Learning any other foreign language will help you know more about languages (including English), and the best way to learn more about one of the romance languages is to study one of the romance languages. I bet the kids who did not do their Latin homework thought to themselves, "why am I learning this useless language?" I wouldn't do the homework either!

Then don't sign up to take Latin as an elective. I think that is a much better solution than calling it a useless language, wasting the teacher's time and dragging down the kids who actually like the subject.

The same people who are dismissing Latin on this thread are probably the same ones who reject Great Books curricula because they were written by dead, white males.

Anonymous wrote:Latin is very useful if you ever meet a really old Roman.

It is also very useful for the SAT and ACT.

Latin is very useful if you ever meet a really old Roman.

My 6 year old has started learning latin. He started asking me questions about word roots, why some words are spelled a certain way but the letters aren't heard, or why he would hear a sound in a word but didn't see the sound when it was spelled out.

My head was spinning from all the questions I had no answers to. Latin gives him the why behind the language. He loves making sense of English. It allows him to put order into the chaos of the language.

My DCs have had an amazing Latin teacher as well, to the point where they still say (and 2 are in college and another a senior in high school) the Latin teacher was the best teacher they ever had and stay in touch. The teacher's enthusiasm for the classics and love for the subject made a huge impact on my DCs, and not just in the teacher's classes.

As far as it being a "useless language," my two in college are science majors so Latin is helpful there, another learned French quite easily because of knowing Latin and two were accepted into Virginia's Governor's Academy for Latin, which in addition to having the best three weeks of their lives, was a nice boost in college admissions.

Anonymous wrote:Latin helped me learn Spanish in 2 semesters.
I had never heard Spanish spoken until I moved here.

If you had studied Spanish instead of Latin, you wouldn't have needed 2 semesters to learn Spanish. And once you have one romance language down, the others are easy to learn.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:At what public school do they teach this useless language?

Latin is not useless. It is very useful if you go into medicine. It is also helpful for knowing more about languages, English and Romance languages.

Learning any other foreign language will help you know more about languages (including English), and the best way to learn more about one of the romance languages is to study one of the romance languages. I bet the kids who did not do their Latin homework thought to themselves, "why am I learning this useless language?" I wouldn't do the homework either!

Anonymous wrote:Op - can you ask your son what's "audience" in latin?

Auditorium

Latin helped me learn Spanish in 2 semesters.
I had never heard Spanish spoken until I moved here.

Op - can you ask your son what's "audience" in latin?

Anonymous wrote:At what public school do they teach this useless language?

Latin is not useless. It is very useful if you go into medicine. It is also helpful for knowing more about languages, English and Romance languages.

At what public school do they teach this useless language?

DC was helping out after class one day when the teacher said "You know what's great about Latin 2? All the kids from Latin 1 who didn't do their homework are gone."

DC had straight A+'s in Latin 1 and thought it was funny. I was surprised by the candor of the Latin teacher, but can't deny it's true.