I'm honestly surprised to learn that anyone defends learning Latin outside of academic scholarship. I guess I feel the same about Greek but no one learns that in the US so it's less argued about.

I took Latin in high school and felt that I wasted four years I could have spent learning (rudimentary) Spanish, or at least something that had any cultural relevance at all. You have to find a way to make kids care about it as well as justifying its utility.

I see Latin and Greek education as historical relics, akin to how we used to emphasizing testing students' ability to construct shapes with compasses and straightedges, or their ability to memorize bible verses.

> ...something that had any cultural relevance at all.

My high school was heavily focused on Latin and ancient Greek. We spent the first two years grokking grammar and semantics. Then, in liceo (the last 3 years) we would study history by translating and studying poems, speeches, plays...

Teacher and students used to discuss for hours about the meaning and context of this or that sentence. It was a wonderful way to understand our ancestors' mindset. Dead languages are the best tools for a deeper appreciation of history.

And current languages too. A while back I found this diagram http://imgur.com/ZNlwDUZ, to me it shows how logical greeks were. Terms are symmetrical, well organized, forming a tiny core of combinators.

That diagram is great, but I'm not sure this sort of preposition inventory is that specific to ancient Greek. When I studied German, I feel like we had rather similar charts.

German has specific prepositions I recognize as equivalent to each main Greek preposition as defined in that chart, except maybe the distinction between εις and εν, which German would handle by a noun case distinction (ancient Greek εις την θαλασσαν → German ins Meer (accusative, < "in das"), ancient Greek εν τῃ θαλασσῃ → German im Meer (ablative, < "in dem"). German breaks up some meanings differently -- "among" is unter (shared with "beneath" rather than "between") -- but anyway there are other languages with a pretty nice set of prepositions!

Thanks, I'm all for finding similar structures in other languages.

I upvoted you for your last sentence alone. What high school did you go to, and is it still heavily focused on Latin and Greek?

Probably is a common Liceo Classico in Italy, where Latin and Greek are teached each for 5 and 4 hours a week during the first two years and 4 and 3 hours during the following three years.

which highlights the point that choice of subjects should very much be culture-specific.

Picking up latin as an italian seems far simpler (and probably more useful) than as an english, as you can guess large part of the lexicon and you will be exposed to "volgare" (transitional latin-italian) when studying early italian literature.

But would studying Old English be of any use for italians? I am not sure.

Yes, I attended an experimental classico.

On a day to day basis, the average American is simply actually a lot likelier to encounter Latin biological nomenclature or legal or religious terminology than, say, a fluent conversation in German.

The United States is largely monolingual in English for a thousand miles, and the language ideology here causes immigrants to want their children to shift to English monolingualism as quickly as possible. And thus bad Latin is more useful than bad German.

The real problem I run into as someone who speaks English natively and German as a second language is, outside of the Internet and reading books, I never have a chance to speak German. Even in the actual country of Germany, I speak German just bad enough that I can tell it's painful for people to listen to me struggle, and they'll quickly switch to English if they know it (which they do). The only benefit is I know what the weather forecast will be and I know what the announcements at the Bahnhof mean, so I know what train to get on.

I've visited Mexico with my Spanish-speaking wife (semi-natively) and while the locals loved to hear her speak their language, we communicated mostly in English if we wanted to be easily understood.

The struggle is real for Americans, or for native English speakers as a whole. For Americans, there is no other language spoken for thousands of miles like you mentioned (Mexico and Quebec (to a limited extent)), and even then, most of the people we interact with on vacation will speak English.

I put serious effort into maintain my German, and she puts serious effort into maintaining her Spanish. But we rarely have the chance to actually use it, even if we're in a country that speaks the language. English has won.

You are using English because you are using English. When I lived in Germany I used German nearly 100% of the time, and now I speak fluent German with hardly a hitch. 10 years later I regularly run into German speakers, and while it feels a little rusty now, I continue using German because I know if I fall back on English Im going to be using English and not learning German. I recommend you adopt the same learning strategy.

I have been learning Chinese in China for about 7 months, and have a functional command of most conversations because I never ever use English during those conversations. English will always win if you keep biking with the training wheels on.

When I lived in Cambodia for an even longer time I didnt learn nearly as much Khmer because I was constantly speaking in English, even though I diligently listened to Khmer conversations and researched the language. Like programming, language learning is much slower as a spectator sport.

Right, that's what I'm saying. It's harder to learn another language as an English speaker because there far less incentive to speak anything other than English. Because most people I end up talking to around the world can speak their native language and English, so we both end up speaking English. Sometimes we're speaking English at their request (I've known people who refuse to speak to me in their native language) and sometimes at my request (I really need to understand them and not mishear something).

In my travels, I've yet to run into someone who I really need to talk to who only speaks their native (non-English) language.

Aren't there some web sites/services/communities where you can speak with like-minded people? I think I remember that I've visited about half a dozen of these things over the past year.

And feel free to drop me a mail and have a call if you want. :)

ごんばって、ね！

So I put that into Google Translate and it detects it as Japanese. It then translates it into English as "Gonba~tsu Te, ne!" So I have no idea what you're saying.

Good lord, Google Translate is even worse with Japanese than I remember. Sorry! This is a very common phrase in Japanese, that comes up all the time. It means something like "Please work very hard", but it's meant to be very encouraging!

You misspelled your Japanese. In Chinese characters the term is "頑張って," and in kana it is "がんばって." Google Translate did the best it could with what you wrote.

It's still an interesting commentary on Google's handling of Japanese kana. I knew immediately what the GP comment meant to say, but googling (.co.jp) for "ごんばって" doesn't even come up with a "did you mean...?"

I disagree with this.

There's this common argument that prescribes utility to studying Latin via the value you gain by understanding biological, legal, and religious terminology.

I think that the net utility that you gain through this mechanism is approximately zero. Or rather, the net utility over other, more direct methods of acquiring this knowledge is zero. I think you could gain the requisite understanding of Latin to gain 99% of this utility in a few weeks of study, and that if understanding these roots is so important it should be material in our English classes, not in a long-term study of the Latin language itself.

Besides the "it helps you to know roots" argument, the study of a language gains utility largely in being able to speak the language, make do when traveling to places where the language is spoken, or consume the literature and media in the language. Moreover, the utility you gain from the language increases exponentially - a year of (half-assed, high-school-level) study is pretty useless, but after a few years of it, especially with higher (college-level?) standards, it's immensely useful because it opens you up to whole new worlds.

I think the best argument for teaching languages in high school is that this exponential growth starts earlier and is more likely to ever happen (especially for people who don't go to college or don't study languages there) if we start earlier.

Granted, there's utility gained from appreciating the culture of the language even as you learn the beginnings of it in high school, but I think that's dwarfed by the long-term potential for useful bilingualism and having the ability to more more easily experience new cultures.

--

also, anecdotally, my bad Latin has given me essentially 0 utility in my entire life since high school. Perhaps I got a few novelty realizations here and there, like identifying that "tractor" came from "trahere" and "et" means "and" in "et cetera", but those are trivial. Maybe my experience was unusual and others gained more from it. Also, admittedly, I can't really quantify or remember whether it improved my SAT scores or whatnot, but my overall assessment is that my Latin study was negligible.

Certainly it is much more valuable to teach kids language early on, beginning in primary school. Dual immersion schools seem to be very successful at teaching bilingualism. The problem is that in the US, the status quo is instead minimal classroom language education very late.

Arguably, you could say that about many bodies of knowledge as much as Latin. The question is really: What percentage of people take that mandatory one year minimum of high school language and really build it into something valuable? I think it's pretty low. And,

bad German < bad Latin < good Latin < good German

U.S. school systems generally are simply unwilling to invest the resources needed to get kids really bilingual.

That's fair. I think I agree with your ordering. Our language education really is abysmal. Only Spanish really has a good chance of catching on outside of the classroom since it is gaining prominence in American culture (in my observation).

I do think that if all language programs are bad at a school then bad-Spanish would still have a higher utility than bad-Latin.

Knowing some of the changes Latin went through on its way to Spanish helped me at least once. I would use (inflict?) my Spanish on the kind folks at a nearby Mexican restaurant, and when I ordered a fajita quesadilla, the server asked me if I wanted "hongo". I thought for a second, recalled the "f" -> "h" transition (e.g. ferrum -> hierro, facere -> hacer) and "u" to "o"... aha! fungus! Why yes, I do want mushrooms on my fajita quesadilla.

Constructing things with compasses was the only time I remember doing any creative problem solving in my whole school career.

That may be true, but there are other ways of doing creating problem solving in mathematics that aren't as .. specialized. I'd rather figure out how to teach fields to get you that experience more effectively on more generally useful problems, than regress to proxying a math education with a compass-construction education. [seriously, if you read those old Harvard entrance exams from the 1800s, more than half math is compass problems.]

I actually got to do lots of creative problem solving somehow, but I understand how many did not. Coding is where that really took off but I did math contests and stuff when I was younger.

"You live a new life for every new language you speak. If you know only one language, you live only once." -- Czech proverb

Dead languages like Latin and Old Greek don't add lives. You don't even speak them.

More seriously: I'm all for offering Latin, Greek, and even Esperanto but why would you give up teaching modern foreign languages? Why do you think they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto?

I'll be more bold than panglott... we can't "give up" teaching modern foreign languages, because we already don't teach modern foreign languages.

I took four years of high school French, and got decent grades. I recently started reviewing and learning more through flashcards in Anki. On the one hand, the fours years of "study" put enough French in my head that I'm making progress this way... on the other hand, as I continue making what is frankly a great deal more progress with the spaced-repitition than I ever made in school I still can't help but notice I still can not fluently read much of anything, let alone speak or hear it.

Now, as it is common on the Internet to confuse saying something is true with advocating for that fact, let me say that A: I still think learning a language is a good idea, I just don't think what we have now can actually be called "learning a language" and B: if we were ever allowed to change The Holy Curriculum [1], there's probably more effective ways to teach a foreign language. I can't help but notice that my Anki-based studies are wildly more effective than what I tried to do in school. (They're also still inadequate on their own so far. No contradiction there... my schooling was even more inadequate, you see.) Four years of a properly-researched and developed language program, with proper software support, might have produced someone at least capable of using the language at the end.

[1]: A phrase I am settling in on to indicate my contempt for the idea that we need to deeply reform education, but we must do so under the constraint that nobody is ever allowed to remove, add, reorder, or change anything we do, ever.

Language study is tough in high school. A better case can be made for teaching languages as early as possible (pre-K, K-6). My nephew's Catholic school is teaching him Spanish[1] in pre-K and will continue until 8th grade. I took Dakota (not to be confused with Lakota) in high school. I couldn't really speak it then or now[2], but it did stick with me[3], but I see the children who learned it in K-6 did much better.

1) My parents and I recently took my 5 year old nephew with us on vacation to DC. He tends to sing at that age. We were in an elevator and he started in on a song and a couple from Spain started asking me questions about it. I really could only say he was being taught Spanish at his school.

2) I just cannot do a guttural with my voice. It sounds like I'm coughing. I have such a low voice anyway that it sounds wrong all the way around. At least I learned from a male instructor, that's a bit important as the sexes speak differently in Dakota. My old boss, a female, learned to speak from her uncles and her aunts thought she "spoke like a man".

3) I still do server names in Dakota. wanca is my #1 server.

Pretty awesome, that you learned some Dakota! At least it gives you something to work with, if you wanted to expose your kids/nephew to it. Bilingualism from childhood is a really powerful and amazing gift to a child, and really it doesn't matter what the languages are: a heritage language is as good as a major national language.

The dual-language immersion programs are really awesome; I've seen kids from monolingual English families learn to do all their math work in Spanish by the end of kindergarten. Teaching kids language in that way is so much more effective, I hope those programs only become more popular.

The key premise is that one year of mandatory classroom teaching isn't actually going to get someone speaking proficiently, unless perhaps it's something like Esperanto.

They won't be speaking Latin either, but at least some written knowledge of Latin will be useful. The basic paradigm of classroom language education started when Latin was commonly taught... and since it focused on teaching passive, literary use of the language (rather than active, oral use), that was entirely appropriate.

But superficial, passive, literary understanding of modern national languages doesn't help anyone much more than it would of Latin.

Sure, but the point is that a superficial literary understanding of Spanish is a stepping stone towards plonking yourself in a Spanish-speaking country and realising just how much Spanish you don't know, not to mention a substantial step towards being able to read a vast and growing quantity of Spanish-only written material.

A superficial literary understanding of Latin gives you middle class bragging rights and a substantial step towards being able to parse the original text of a literature which has been exhaustively translated into English, complete with notes on shades of meaning. (And an even more limited grasp of some of the fundamentals of Spanish, I suppose) And since the source material is all ancient texts, you can't even pep the teaching up with some relevant and modern material or motivate the students by the prospect they can use it to backpack in Peru or do language exchange in Madrid.

I'm not persuaded that the inadequacy of languages teaching is an argument for the same time to be devoted to devoted to something which is even further removed from being useful and the teacher is even less likely to be adequately equipped to teach.

These days we have good models for how to teach bilingualism to kids: dual-language immersion schools, in which both languages are used extensively in coursework. The problem is that this labor-intensive model will be impractical outside metropolitan areas with school choice, or communities with a strong heritage language community.

Latin may not be a living language, but it remains very widely used in scientific terminology, law, religion, and elsewhere. Like the prestigious national languages, it is a mark of erudition and social status; the demonstration of which is itself a purpose of education.

The point is that many students continue learning that language past that one year. It's much better to give students practical skills in a living language.

There's research showing that one year of Esperanto followed by three of French leads to greater French fluency than four years of French: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto

Those studies included tutelage in the structure of language as part of their Esperanto instruction, so the same benefit might exist simply by modifying students' language curricula.

What percentage of American high-school students who take their mandatory year of foreign language continue on to speak that language proficiently and competently? What "practical skills"?

The supposed economic value from learning modern national languages is wildly overstated, for English monolinguals. It's better to learn languages because learning languages is valuable for its own sake, and pick the language you learn simply because you like it.

There is a huge disconnect between our implicit goals for language learning in this country and the effort we expend upon it.

I strongly believe in the value of language education, but given the amount of time and money we're willing to spend on it, we'd get as much or more benefit from making them study Latin.

With Latin, all the people who want to learn a Romance language would get a leg up on it, and all the people who want to study biology would get a leg up on that, and people who are fine with just speaking English will get more insight into their own language.

Every year spent learning Latin in advance of a living language pushes the learning of that living language further out of the critical period of language acquisition.

What's wildly overstated is the benefit learning Latin has on anything other than taking the SAT. Studying French is much more beneficial to speaking French than studying Latin and I shouldn't have to explain why that is the case.

The mandatory minumum year of foreign language is already outside the "critical period hypothesis" anyway.

If you buy the critical period hypothesis anyway, which I do not.

The thing is, in this country in the last decade or two, we've seen the rise of dual-language immersion schools that are actually effective at teaching bilingualism. These are mostly English-Spanish, but there are French immersion schools in Louisiana, and indigenous language schools for Cherokee, Hawaiian, &c. This method of language education actually seems to produce children who are bilingual in both languages; they are a major advance in language education in the United States, and they should be wholeheartedly supported.

The "mandatory one year of foreign language in high school" is a relic of decades past when Latin and Greek were widely taught, and that is what they are mostly what they are suited for. It is just as much a relic as Latin is.

Another popular bilingual immersion option is English-Mandarin. I know people here in San Francisco who have kids doing bilingual Mandarin immersion, apparently with good results. I love Latin and Latin teaching, support its availability, and think it's benefited me and other students who were given the opportunity to learn Latin, but I think you're right that the recent modern-language immersion trend is incredibly valuable and deserving of support. We should want language teaching to be effective and beneficial for students.

There's nothing on the scale of full-time immersion, nor is there likely to be, but there's now a small minority of Latin teachers who are presenting Latin as a spoken language, including using Latin as the language of instruction and attempting to apply modern language pedagogical techniques like Total Physical Response. So even some Latin teachers might agree with your criticism of the less-holistic teaching styles and the distance they put between students and the language.

Edit: I didn't notice that you were also advocating teaching Latin further up in the thread.

>Every year spent learning Latin in advance of a living language pushes the learning of that living language further out of the critical period of language acquisition.

Let's be honest here - nothing of value is lost.

The opportunity costs of even one year of any non-English language for American HS students makes it simply not worth it.

Languages are not just languages. They're also a component of a wider culture. Foreign language education exposes students to cultures and ways of thinking not present in their day to day culture and allows them to understand and possibly communicate with people around them who speak that language (living in central Texas, you ought to know a bit of Spanish).

Why? I have basic french and german and it was usefull many times.

> should give up on teaching modern foreign languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto

Why teach Latin, Greek, or Esperanto badly? How does that help?

And if you can solve the "badly" problem, why not teach something that can be used day-to-day?

That most Americans do not have occasion to speak a language other than English day to day is exactly the reason most of them will not learn another language.

The "badly" problem is actually a really huge one.

Guess what determines school curricula in most cases? The opinions of the parents who care enough to go to school board meetings, serve on the board or complain to officials.

As someone who knows the Polish language: I agree with you. With the Esperanto part, at least. Latin's very mentally stimulating, but more useless than a modern language, so I wouldn't quite agree with learning it.

I think we have some strange ideas about how and why studying languages are "useful". Most Americans are monolingual English speakers, and almost by definition can't study a language that's more "useful" than English.

There are large cognitive benefits to bi- and multilingualism, but for these it doesn't actually matter what language you speak: a heritage or minority language is as good as anything else.

But the classroom model of the United States isn't actually designed to make people multilingual; if anything, it's the opposite. The default language policy of the United States is mostly to shift people to English monolingualism, no matter their circumstances, heritage, or language rights.

I took 5 years of French, 3 years of Latin. I enjoyed them up until the last ~75% or so of my senior year when I was really sick of the whole high school business. I don't think the Latin had outside utility of any sort until the 2nd or 3rd year simply because I didn't have the vocabulary (and I, like the vast majority of people, was unaware of spaced repetition and hated non-spaced repetition flashcards). The study of French and Roman culture and history was more interesting (and also fun when done in the respective languages) but due to the lack of slow history (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/09/slow-hi...) in modern education I'd say its utility was limited. That utility I got from Latin the language was mainly in deciphering a few words (or contemplating a deeper meaning behind them) instead of reaching for Google's "define:word" -- but my vocabulary has lapsed and I don't care to refresh it. The other form of utility was minor because I had already studied French for two years, and that utility is contemplation of different grammatical forms and how language is structured, which can improve communication skills. I had a great English grammar class in 8th grade, and that was basically it for serious study of English grammar, but learning French allowed me to reflect more on language grammar in general so when Latin came along it was just another thing to reflect on rather than starting the reflection itself, very marginal utility.

But these utilities really don't justify the classes and resources on their own... If we want high school to produce the greatest amount of utilons, we should be explicit about that, but then many many things will need to change. I believe English should be the world language, there's no practical reason to teach anything else at the expense of other more practical things to teach (like programming), especially in English speaking countries. If we want high school to more approximate what Universities used to represent, such as encouraging more Intellectualism (which I don't think is all that great, at least society-wide, from a utility perspective...), we should be explicit about that too, and again things will change. You might want to have students study French, Greek, Latin, Lojban, etc. for at least 2 years each because of Intellectualism -- but you may also want to balance that with more modern things like deeper computer science or math or physics, which won't help most people in their future lives either but can at least be fun and intellectually interesting for people who want their Intellectualism a certain way. Or we can try for a mix, but I'd propose that our current system is a mix, and other mixes will inevitably resemble the current system by being one-size-fits-all and not work too well. So if we want both, separate. Bring back trade schools and let young teenagers wholly uninterested in purely intellectual pursuits get to doing more interesting things like building a house or building JavaEE applications, and let the intellectuals do their thing without constantly having to waste time and energy rationalizing some vague utility and relevance to their proof-carrying code research.

There are lots of things more immediately valuable than badly-learned languages. But languages learned well seem to measurably improve a person's cognitive performance. IT improves memory, creativity, staves off mental aging, &c. http://panglott.blogspot.com/2011/06/bilingualism-brain-heal...