If you do Latin – why??

We do Latin because it helps so much with vocabulary. Because of my Latin knowledge (which is not extensive), I can look at a word I’ve never seen before and have a pretty good idea what it means. Another reason my children are learning it is because Latin phrases are so frequently referred to in literature, including newspaper articles. Mea Culpa for instance. I would not have had any idea what that mean apart from Latin knowledge. 

We have considered it, but my kids are still very young (oldest is 8).  The reason I am considering Latin is because my 2nd is so highly into science.  She wants to be an astronaut some day (no joke!), and so as a scientist she will need to know Latin.  So for sure by high school I will want her learning Latin, if not before, just for that.  I’m not sure if the other kids would need to know it, but by then, I figure we’ll have some better ideas what they will want/need for more languages.  For right now, we are sticking with Spanish, and in a couple years, we will add German.

I just ran into an interesting free seminar.  Thought I’d share the link.  This is a seminar done by the Latin teacher (a homeschool mom) of Landry  Academy, a program providing classes to homeschool students.  Here is the website listing the free seminars:

http://landryacademy.com/rec.htm

It’s about a half an hour, and there is audio and also visuals.  The title of the program is “Redux:  Top Ten  Reasons to be a Latin Geek” 

Latin exercises a LOT more logic than French does (I speak both).  I learned French first and then Latin, and I wish I’d learned more Latin earlier.  Latin is a highly inflected language, French only somewhat inflected.  This means that in French, for example, word meaning is conveyed also by position in sentence and some endings.  In Latin, meaning is conveyed primarily by endings–many of them, which must be categorized and memorized, and which you must rely upon in unraveling long complex sentences.  Learn to do that, and you’ll have a rigorous, well-organized, logical mind.  Many sentences in classical Latin, for example Caesar’s writings, have all the verbs in the sentence at the END, and you have to slowly sort through the entire sentence to figure out what each of the five verbs goes with and how to make sense of the sentence.  Once you learn to do this, there is NO sentence in English that will give you any trouble!  Even those nice half-a-page eighteenth century ones.  🙂  Also, as you’ll note in the seminar link I sent, studying a foreign language is associated with higher than average SAT scores–but studying Latin is associated with the highest of all.  In this day and age, that extra 150 points on the SAT could be the difference of thousands of dollars in scholarships–more than worth my investment in books and time to teach Latin.  And I must say that this has been born out in my own family.  My sons have always scored quite well on the Iowa tests–we have to test regularly here.  But when I got my oldest son’s SAT results back, I was astounded–he did much, much better than I expected!  I went over the results carefully and discovered that most of it was directly attributable to the vocabulary he’s gained by studying classic languages.  Where he answered correctly questions that most students missed, they invariably had a difficult vocab word in it (he didn’t miss any questions on the verbal part.)  I gave a rousing cheer for Latin that night!  LOL

My oldest is a Jr in public HS and I am pleased to report that there is an AMAZING Latin teacher there. He is taking Latin 3 next term and has learned so much. Even he sees the value of it making it easier to decode words and learn other languages. I am doing Latin For Children with mine after a year of Prima Latina. They remember a lot and are so pleased when they come across a word that has Latin roots. It is the one piece of classical ed that I can’t let go of!