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Learning the basic Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes is interesting and useful, and even some vocabulary, but there is a difference between knowing a vocabulary (i.e. recognising words) and an arcane sadistic heavily inflected grammar that isn't any use anywhere else. If you want a hard grammar that is at least usful, try German.
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German grammar is really simplified and straightforward. It's the Slavic languages which mirror the numbers of cases and inflections of Latin.
I couldn't make head nor tail of my dad's language (Ukrainian) until I was lucky enough to pass the 11-plus, and went to a grammar school, where the first class on day one was Latin. Suddenly everything fell into place. They did things the right way round back then: you learnt Latin first, and didn't tackle German or Spanish until the third form. That way the latter were really easy. Modern schools start with the modern languages, 'cos they're they're the only useful ones innit; everyone finds them too difficult without a knowledge of Latin grammar, and hardly anyone now leaves school with a working knowledge of any foreign language, ancient or modern. |
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Learning a harder language first that is useless makes it harder to learn an easier language that is useful so they can't learn them?
Makes absolutely no sense! It's like saying people can't do the breast stroke because they didn't start with the butterfly. |
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Well, if I haven't convinced you of the usefulness of Latin by now, then there's no point trying any more.
But the reason Latin is the best choice for a first 'hard' language to learn is the sheer familiarity of the vocabulary and the pronunciation. No other language offers that to English speakers. You start with dominus, domine, dominum, and you think of 'dominate', 'dominion'; bellum, bellum, bellum gives you 'belligerent' and 'bellicose'; recite amo, amas, amat and you can see where 'amorous' came from. If you start straight off with Polish or Russian, the whole thing looks so strange that just coming to grips with the pronunciation, for instance, is a massive hurdle. The thought of at the same time having to learn what the nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative and locative cases represent, in terms of these strange and baffling words, is enough for any sensible person to just give up. And that's just the nouns. Believe me. Learning the parts of speech in the familiar surroundings of Latin is the only way for an English speaker to do it. I took a Russian language course as part of my degree, and both of the students who had no knowledge of Latin simply dropped out after a few weeks. They were just floundering. |
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I certainly learnt about tenses etc from Latin and English made more sense after.
I can't say I ever liked Latin, but it has been very useful. My wife is particularly jealous of my knowledge in determining what many words, whose roots are in Latin, mean. |