There are plenty of reasons, why you should learn a new language. Some are more obvious than others. I don't want to go into the neurological part too deeply - for simplicity let's just assume, that learning something new benefits your brain. New neuronal connections are established. The neurons connect into clusters. New 'thinking-patterns' are established, as you learn new words, grammatics and sentences.
As I write this, I'm using latin letters.
In this sentence, all latin expressions are italic, to demonstrate it's importance and relevance.
Spanish, French, Portugese, Italian are all 'romanic' languages.
With a good background in latin, you will have easy acces to these languages and can probably understand most newspaper articles. ( French not so much, to be honest )
You could be able to spot all latin expressions and have a much better understanding of English.
You will understand certain concepts to the bone and not just learn their meaning from secondary sources.
Some examples:
- public
- republic ( res publica )
- private (!)
- sentence
- man ( human )
- capital
- nation
When you progress in latin and apply it frequently, you will soon automatically pick up on old greek, too.
Those are the two main sources of all 'philosophical' and 'political' expressions for the whole of Europe.
For a conclusion I'd like to go back to the beginning and remind you how learning languages affects your brain.
The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.
Marcus Aurelius
You could be able to think like a roman !
I'm part of an online email list that uses only Latin to communicate, and every day I get several emails in Latin from fluent users.
for real ?
I never learned how to speak it.
We only used it one way ... Latin to German.
At this point I'd rather learn French or Polish.
Yes, I was very excited the day someone on Grex decided to bash Esperanto.
Can i join?
I love this: "You will understand certain concepts to the bone and not just learn their meaning from secondary sources." I've so often wished I could read great works of literature in the languages they were written in so I could get the real flavor. But I never thought about learning a dead language so I could understand English better. Here I always thought Latin was just something used to torture schoolchildren in years gone by...
Learning any language will help you to understand your own better. One of the advantages to learning Latin is that so much English vocabulary is borrowed from Latin directly, or indirectly via French. This also makes learning Latin easier, since you already know a lot of the words.
Lingua latina is an amazing language to learn. I recommend https://www.youtube.com/user/latintutorial to start with.
True.Because of latin i learned italian to a fluent level in one year c:
But here is to take into consideration that i speak latin often...
If you are just going to make boring translation work i don't know if this is going to be the same.I don't get the point in translating: Isn't it easier to get fluent and read it instead of this tortuous -down writing-change into SVO-translating ...I mean you learned it in the end of the day if it is part of your daily life,thoughts and interaction...
So please if you want to learn latin,speak this wonderful language c:
-Excuse my english :D