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Joined: Sep 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Welcome Mechan.
Taking Latin is a good idea. The love of languages and words will always serve you well.
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Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
I'm not sure how studying an inflected language like Latin would help you understand the grammar of an analytic language like English any more than the study of any other foreign language would. In particular I would think that studying German would be better if only because it gives you an analog to the English phrasal verb that I don't think most of the older of us were ever exposed to in English grammar classes.
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Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,788
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,788 |
If you don't want to "spend" your efforts in a college class -- which proceeds at the teacher's pace -- learning Latin, there are several not-bad Latin courses available on-line which can be done at the student's pace, which is sometimes better.
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,819
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,819 |
I took a semester of Latin in college and am glad I did.
I wish I had seized the opportunity in college to really learn another language like Spanish, French or German or perhaps an Asian language. Instead I just half-heartedly fulfilled my foreign language requirement.
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Joined: Aug 2005
Posts: 3,290
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2005
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I first tried to learn Latin on my own in third grade. I had got my hands on a turn-of-the-century Latin grammar, and was diligently trying to figure out what cases were and why Latin has five or sometimes six, when I stopped trying. Latter, in high school, I got the Latin teacher (who also taught English and German) to teach me Latin during his break period. The deal was I'd get to keep the Latin textbook, as Latin had been cancelled years before to help pay for more footballs or tackling dummies, and I'd give him 5 minutes to smoke a quick cigarette. A couple of years later I took Latin 2 in the local Community College (also taught by a German teacher), and by the time I got to a four year university, I took Latin prose. We read Cicero's Pro Archia and memorized grammatical terms from Buck and Hale's. Other languages I studied formally while in school: Spanish, French, German, Sanskrit, Hittite, Hindi, Homeric Greek, and Tunica. The former Russian teacher at our high school also gave me a copy of the no longer used Russian textbook, and would try to speak Russian with me. He was teaching social studies at that point, but at one point also flew back to Washington DC to translate between Brezhnev and Nixon. After graduating, I also had the pleasure of teaching Latin 1 to four undergraduates at another local four year college as TA for the Latin and Homeric Greek professor (who also taught German).
I think that Latin is a good language to learn because it is different, grammatically, from English, and exposes you to new ways to carve up the morphological and syntactic pie. When some pedant tells you that word order is a feature of universal grammar, you can laugh at them (to yourself). Also, when somebody tries to hypercorrect the plural of virus, you can snort.
Other than Latin, I'd say a good language to study is Mandarin Chinese. It's got no overlap lexically. It's got the tone thing. And it's got a world-class difficult and different writing system. It seemingly has no morphology; at least no inflection. Lots of people also speak it.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Joined: Feb 2006
Posts: 43
newbie
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OP
newbie
Joined: Feb 2006
Posts: 43 |
Quote:
Also, when somebody tries to hypercorrect the plural of virus, you can snort.
Hehe 
I actually understood that.
Um.... I unsuccesfully tried to learn Esperanto by myself a few years back... I remember I also wanted to learn Hawai'ian.
I want to learn so many languages too: Latin, French, Japanese, German, maybe Esperanto, maybe Italian. But I wouldn't be able to. I'd have to be in school forever and dedicate my entire schooling to languages, and I'm alrady half way done. And you only take about four or five classes a semester, I would at least have to take two years of each language. And then there's actually practicing it and maintaing it and not forgeting. I took two years of French in middle school and I don't even remember anything.
[insert signature here]
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Joined: Mar 2005
Posts: 17
stranger
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stranger
Joined: Mar 2005
Posts: 17 |
I'll bring this up again, although this was mentioned some time ago  The Finnish Broadcasting Company airs news in Latin, and apparently host a Latin website with news from Finland and abroad. Maybe worth checking out... I'd guess you can listen to the news through the website if you want to.
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Joined: Sep 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Rumor has it that this Latin service is now Finished due to death threats from the Geek Orthodontic Church in protest at the cartoons poking fun at The Tooth Fairy. ;]
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 427
addict
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addict
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 427 |
Quote:
The Finnish Broadcasting Company airs news in Latin, and apparently host a Latin website with news from Finland and abroad.
So what is it with Latin in Finland? In my family we have the oddest story concerning this: back when my mother was a kid, sometime in the 1950s, my grandfather, who was a schoolteacher and therefore taught Latin to his students, found a youngish student-type foreigner wandering around the streets in Madrid, completely lost, slightly agitated, and unable to communicate in Spanish, or French, of which my grandpa had a smattering. My grandfather was concerned about this young man's situation and took him home nearby, so that the guy could have some food, some rest, and hopefully they could work out where he was meant to be going.
Over lunch, although no one at the house could speak anything much other than Spanish, they all managed to communicate with signs, and when they showed the man an atlas he pointed out Finland as his country. In the process of trying to find out more about him my grandpa had the lightbulb idea to try some Latin words, and voilá! The Finn could understand it and speak back! Before my maternal family's astounded eyes, my grandpa and this foreigner launched into this weird Latin conversation, which well-declensed or not, allowed them to establish that the man was trying to make his way to Andalucía, to see Córdoba and Granada. The rest of the story is kind of shrouded in the mists of time, but apparently they managed to put him on a train for his destination eventually, my grandpa happily going clackety-clack in Latin all the time.
Random story, I know, but this is how my family learnt that Finns learn a lot of Latin, and that my grandfather could do much more than just teach it!
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Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,891
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Other languages I studied formally while in school: Spanish, French, German, Sanskrit, Hittite, Hindi, Homeric Greek, and Tunica.
Wow, zmj.. Can you still converse in all of those languages?
I'm currently trying to learn Spanish. I'm using the Berlitz method with CDs and a really basic book to follow along with the CDs.
It's quite an interesting method. Apart from the opening chapter, that explains how the method works, there is no other language but Spanish in the textbook or spoken on the CD. The sounds around the words give you the indication of what they are saying.
What it forces you to do is learn the words without doing the translation thing that slows down the thinking process - and slows down your speaking since you translate as you go. It also teaches you basic grammar and verb conjugasions, which is good.
So when they say "Pedro canta" and you hear Pedro singing, you know that they are saying Pedro is singing an assimilate it as canta.
The course isn't meant to be a "tourist" phrases course. Some courses are only designed for you to learn to pronounce specific sentences without really getting a grasp on the language, or being able to hold a conversation.
For example, a German cassette I once tried, focused on teaching things like "where can I catch a bus?" "Where is the restaurant?" Unfortunately, if you don't know the parts of the sentence, you can only learn phonetically and you won't be able to understand anybody that answers you with anything more than a point in the right direction.
Mechan. Maybe you could learn the languages you want that way. It is much cheaper than paying for live classes. If you wish to do business in different languages, then you need the live classes, but if it is just to be able to converse, this is a great method.
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