> ...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.