Three Reasons Why You Should Study Latin

Latin is an ancient, complex, and influential language, and, while nobody speaks it anymore, there are a lot of opportunities to learn it. If you are a high school student, college student, or an adult looking to study something new, you may wonder, why should I learn Latin? What are the benefits of studying a dead language?

It's true, learning Latin is not like mastering French or Spanish. You cannot go out to a Roman restaurant and wow your friends by ordering in Latin, or travel confidently to Pompeii knowing that your Latin will help you get around. In practical situations where foreign languages are normally useful, Latin doesn't quite measure up. There are lots of other good reasons why you should put the time and effort into familiarizing yourself with Latin, however. Here I have listed some of the benefits of a Latin education:

It helps your vocabulary
The English language, while considered to be of Germanic origin, is actually composed largely of words with Romantic origin. This means that by learning Latin, you will discover the root words for many of the words commonly used in the English language. Why is this important? You'll be surprised how your vocabulary blossoms after a year or two of Latin study. You will hear words you've never heard before, in English as well as in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and the other Romance languages, and will be able to decipher their meaning, without reaching for a dictionary or looking blankly at the speaker. If you have a vocabulary-based test coming up, like the SAT, you will find your study of Latin will help you immensely, by giving you vocabulary clues you didn't even know you had.

It makes learning other languages seem simple
That's right, learning Latin makes your study of other languages seem much easier, because a course in Latin is like a crash course on how to learn language. You'll learn advanced memorization skills, and the basic principles and rules of language as you learn Latin, and so moving on to any other language course will seem easy after weathering Latin's complex structure.

It's not just Latin's complexity that makes other languages seem easy, however. If, after you study Latin, you choose to take a Romance language, you will find memorizing new vocabulary words and reading in this new language to be much easier than it would have been, because you will be able to recognize both English and Latin cognates. For a language like Spanish, which has a lot of both, this makes understanding and reading the language much easier.

You learn history
Since there are very few modern texts written in Latin, and since every piece of ancient writing we have nowadays is part of the historic record, your study of Latin will necessarily include a host of ancient and historically important works, meaning that your study of Latin is more than just a study of language: it is a study of history, culture, and religion. This makes Latin an ideal language to study for an interdisciplinary-minded person, because unlike other languages, where you read modern textbooks with boring modern scenarios and rarely read anything real or meaningful until you've reached the higher levels, almost all of the texts you will encounter in Latin class have a purpose, and will teach you something historically important.