If Latin is so useful, and I have no doubt that it is, why don't more
schools insist on students taking it?  I went to a Catholic,
college-preparatory high school, but it wasn't even offered.  Seems to
me that Latin courses should be more widely available.

65 responses total.

It is often not offered because most schools only have so much money (not
true of the school I attended, but that's another whole story), and can't
afford to offer more than one or two languages.  If they can only have
that many, they would prefer to offer "living" languages, that the students
can learn by the new, communicative teaching methods and use lots of videos
and computer programs.

The fact is that it's difficult to get high school students to see the use
in foreign languages at all, much less ones they will never have the chance
to use in a foreign country.  And, to some extent, they have a point.

Griz

Semper ubi sub ubi.

East Lansing High School offered a Latin class when I was there.  I should
have taken it, but I didn't like the teacher.

I would have loved to take Latin in high school.  It's probably not
offered because for most students, it's not very practical.  When
you only have X time for electives, are you going to take something
you can use for actual communication, or something esoteric that you
can always take in college later?

I found that Latin was the most practical of all! I read foreign languages
far more than I have to speak them. As the original Romance language, Latin
gives me the ability to decipher many texts. I think more people don't take
Latin because it seems impractical and has a bad rep.

On a lighter Latin note:

Illegitimum non carborundum, domine salvum fac.
Illegitimum non carborundum, domine salvum fac.
Gaudeamus igitur, veritas non sequitur.
Illegitimum non carborundum, ipso facto.

 -- Harvard University Band lyrics to "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard"

(Off-color second verse available privately, on request)

Horatius vilam habet
Eee-ey-ee-ey-oh!

Griz

"Impractical" in the sense that you may not be in a situation that requires
reading texts.  If you plan to live in Canada, it doesn't hurt to learn
French.  If you're not going into academia, you're better off with
spoken, living languages.

(I read in a trade publication I get that Spanish will become a very
important langauge for business, especially with the coming of the
free trade pact among the North American countries.)

Latin might be very practical if it enables you to learn the other
Romance languages more easily.

Again, if you have a limited amount of time, you're better off going
straight to the language.  Most high school curricula don't allow for
the possibility of taking two languages, especially one right after
the other.

I took three at once.

Griz

At my high school, if you were in the 'college prep' class, you took:
4 years of English (including AP), 2 years of History (including AP),
4 years of sciences, 4 years of math, and one foreign language.  I
suppose you could have taken two languages (they only offered two)
if you wanted to nuke all your electives, but I really preferred to
learn to type...especially given the mediocrity of our French program.

(not to mention that :10 is quite the OOCQ)

   The best way to learn a language is to be an exchange
student for several months.  It helps to have had a couple
of years of grammar and vocab. first, but nothing can
teach a language as quickly as bare necessity.

   I've heard that the best immersion program for learning
Spanish is given by a monastery in Bolivia.  After one
year, you come out fluent in Spanish, but with a strong
Bolivian accent.  I learned most of my French as an
exchange student in France, and my Spanish in an immersion
program in Guatemala.  The two months in Guatemala were
probably the equivalent of a couple of years of taking
university classes.

Learn to float, then learn to swim. Not to be done on dry land. Works
marvelously. i've forgetten a lot of my Korean but thaat's
how I learned it - dove right in.

I took Latin for 3 semesters ina row--then I moved to Texas and registered
for Latin again.  The teacher said, on my first day in class, that it is
"impossible to speak Latin" because Latin "was only ever intended to be
a written language".  So what exactly was it the Romans used to speak
to each other, I wondered...and dropped the class.  She struck me as an
idiot.

That teacher was/is an ass, imho. You done good, kid, and got outta there.

   Said teacher was indeed stupid.  The Romans, obviously,
spoke latin.  So did educated people through the middle
ages.

And the Roman CAtholic church every week until a few years ago, right?

   Right :)

I actually agree with the "learn to float, then learn to swim" attitude,
though it's not currently in vogue.

   Why? 'Tho I admit, it's a bit frustrating not being able
to communicate at first.  I couldn't say much for the first
month or so of my four-month exchange student stay in France,
and I'd had a year or so of high school French.  It took a
lot of work and patience to get fluent enough to communicate,
but it was worth it!

I think it's important to understand at least the basics of the structure
of a language before "learning to swim".  If I hadn't done it that way,
I may still have learned how to speak German fluently, but I doubt I'd
speak it as well as I do now.  I know not only how to use the language,
but also why it's used that way.

  You have a good point, but one can learn the structure
afterwards, too, and get just as far.  After all, that's
what we do with our native tongue.

Actually, it's not.  Most uneducated people have no idea of the structure
of their native tongue, and yet speak it just fine.

And now we come to the BIG QUESTION -- do we learn a second language
*differently* than the way we learn our first language?  Is it possible
to learn a language the same way as a child does, when you are an adult?

(I don't expect an answer, folks.  Linguists have been arguing about this
one for years.)

Let them argue, but, "no, it's not possible to learn a language
the same way as a child does, when you are an adult," wiith the
singular exception of an amnesia victim, who has been impaired
to the child-like state of mental development.
 

I agree with you, TS, but there's plenty of evidence to the contrary.

   Could you summarize some of it for us?

   Would you be willing to say that an adult can pick up
language just by listening and not taking formal courses?

Oh, sure arthur, that's the fastest way to become communicative, learn
by listening. But after learning a first language that way, AND THEN
studying it in school for formailty's sake, the second language learned
nowhas TWO supports sted of one, the ear-model and the mind-model.
  
re griz's #26, after some consideration, the only situation where I
would +easily+ believe the "evidence tothe contrary" would be if there
was absolutely no written exposure tothe first language, nor any
structural education existing; in other words, exclusively verbal
andwithout any *reference* to anything except a coupling of sound
to thing.
  
In taht case, the adult with one language thus learned, would *have*
to learn the second language in the same was as a child does. Even
tthat though, has the referant of "knowing" that "this thing in my
hand is attached to the sound 'stone' in my native tounge so I can
expect that this thing in my hand will have a different souund association
in this new language I'm learning." But I'll accept that condition
as being too similar to the first language learned to quibble with
teh difference learning the second language.
  
Nouns, of course, would be the easiest to learn first, the "names of
people, places and things," if I remember correctly.

    We perform written and spoken language quite
differently.  When we are taught a foreign language, we
are taught it *as though* there is no difference between
the two different linguistic usages.  Not only are the
two usages of language different, but the 'reality'
taught by grammarians does not always match the way
people really use the language.

    If one wants to learn a language the way it is
*really* used, the only way is to learn by listening.

Personally, I would prefer the co-op approach, both verbal and written
simultaneously.

   Doing both together does help, agreed.  If nothing else,
the written approach gives you vocabulary and the
upper-crust approach to the language.

To pick up again on the question raised in response #24:
An adult can't learn a language entirely the way a child does.  Learning the
first language develops skills, & skills that tie in with important 
reflexes.  You can't help *trying* to apply them, any more than you can
avoid trying to catch yourself when you fall (unexpectedly).  (I include the
simple act of trying to keep your balance when I say "catch yourself".)

Now, some of those skills are definitely out of place in the second language,
and other ones are needed.  So there's some unlearning to do, which the
child avoids, but also some skills the child must develop from the beginning
which the adult can take for granted & just learn to apply differently.

An analogy.  I've played guitar for too many years (I started learning when I
was 15.)  Much later, I got a mandolin.  I've picked around on the mandolin
a reasonable amount, off & on, but never really studied it too much (playing
it, I mean).  When I first started the guitar, I spent incredible amounts
of time trying to learn simple chord changes.  I'd carefully, one at a time,
put down the first finger, then the next ... and when I'd try to start
shifting to a new chord I'd move the wrong finger - looking right at it the
whole time!  Now, in some ways a mandolin is quite diffferent from a guitar.
Everything's squeezed together (I have fat fingers), the tuning is straight
fifths, for that matter each "string" is actually a course of two strings.
Picking technique is greatly affected.  But even so - I wanted to play a note,
I just put my finger down & picked the darn thing.

When I took (beginning) modern Hebrew some years ago, at the Hillel
Foundation, several people in the class had a lot of a particular kind of
trouble.  (This was NOT an immersion situation, you understand.)  They'd
say, "How can they say such-&-such - it doesn't make sense!" when plainly
the problem was that that's not the way we do it in (contemporary) English.
The teacher, a native Israeli, had a similar problem; when the same Heb. word
had several glosses (silly, stupid, crazy, odd, ..., for example) & people
asked her which one it REALLY meant, she'd complain that English had all
these different words for the same thing.  Our (linguistic) experience
shapes our perception, hence the way we learn.

To tie this back into the question of why Latin a bit:  people who've told
me that learning Latin helped them with English appear to have:
- just plain learned new skills, needed (or demanded by teacher) for learning
  Latin, which could then be applied to English, and
- had to unlearn some reflexes appropriate to English much of the time but
  not always.  (Rearrange sentence to suit yourself.)
- And, of course, they got significant insight into etymology, which is
  very often useful.
Only the third of these prima facie makes Latin better than many other
languages, and arguably French or German could be nearly as helpful in that
regard.  (Better in terms of the original question.)  I suspect that the
reason it's been favored & in fact somewhat preferable is that it is a dead
language & has been for a long time.  (Even though it was spoken by many
people less than a century ago, as far as I no it didn't undergo the kind
of change a living language does - I'd guess since the late middle ages.)
This allows the student to receive a packaged, neat product - general rules
can be given (with a finite number of stated exceptions).  Nobody's going
to suddenly start using an adjective as a verb, out of the blue, & have it
be widely accepted.  And yet (I believe - I've never studied Latin myself,
much less original mss) th extant corpus is (or has been) regularized 
somewhat in terms of spelling etc - compared to most languages before
the printing press.  This makes things more manageable, allowing you to
concentrate on the essentials.

For someone who never studied Latin, you have a pretty intelligent
perspective on it.  I studied Latin all through high school and
college (something like eleven semesters) and was comfortably reading
Catullus, Virgil, et al., in the original toward the end, but I never
really got to the point where I sensed the poetry in the poetry, if
you know what I mean.  Sure, "Phasellus ille quem videtis hospites"
zooms along like the yacht (phasellus) it describes, but that's
rudimentary compared to my response to "My heart leaps up when I
behold a rainbow in the sky."  What it did do was give me a lifelong
sense of the roots of the language I use every day, from something
as mundane as knowing that the name "Aquilina" means "eagle-like,"
not "watery," to stuff as abstruse as Milton's famous "elephants
endorsed with towers" - i.e., with towers on their backs; and it
gave me a stationary (dead, if you will) paradigm against which
to measure my and others' use of English.  It also gave me a leg
up on what is being called "cultural literacy" nowadays, but I'm
not sure that's something I wouldn't've developed in my own way
without the Latin.  I'm very suspicious of all the talk about
"cultural literacy," but that's another subject.

Never Latin, & never *anything* to the point of real fluency - but I had my
share of French, 3 semesters of Scientific German For Reading Knowledge, & a
taste of Hebrew (first Biblical, then modern).  And my academic background
(ultimately, philosophy - ABD) helped me pick up a certain amount of Latin &
Greek) vocabulary - technical vocabulary, without the grammar or ordinary
vocabulary to use it at all outside that one context.

For me, even as poor as I am at any of these, there's additional power &
beauty in seeing it in the original if I can put it together at all.  I have
to translate it, not being good enough to really understand it on its own
terms - I get a kind of doubling, the *meaning* combined with a kind of
eerie flavor (best analogy I can make) of the original.

Anything unobvious on top of this is wonderful.  Sometimes (Fr. or Ger.) there
is a consciousness of etymology or of cognates to English words that doesn't
make it through the translation.  Sometimes it's something purely in the
original - poetic devices or wordplay or whatever - that adds spice.
I guess I'm fairly good at beginning to learn languages, & it's a pity I've
never really done it.  (I'd never try to add something to the French or
German item here, but I can sort of understand about half of them.  Of
course, in this context that's simple stuff, & I'm reading it with no
time pressure.  I sometimes get a French Canad. station on the radio, &
I get maybe one word of 20 or 50 - but I enjoy just hearing it.  Is that
too weird for people?)

I don't think I quite got that?

On the assumption that someone out there hasn't seen it & will appreciate it:
  O sibili! Si ergo!
  Fortibuses in ero
  O nobili! Demis trux
  Si vatis innem - causen dux
(This was displayed, framed & in some fancy script, in a classroom in my
high school.  (All right, it was the physics classroom.)  I am to blame for
the punctuation & any misspellings.)

<< I just GOTTA find some of my Latin books, damnit, just GOTTA!>>
  
 V E R Y   loosly, it is the "cause of light" (mispelling of lux up there)

No, it was "dux".  (I believe the words are all genuine Latin words, but
the whole is not Latin.)

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss