I've been taking Latin for a few years now, having by far the best teachers ever for it along the way. I was just wondering, how useful is my knowledge of the linguam latinam after college and in the real world? And how useful are world languages in general?

For students and former students of language, feel free to answer the poll above. Suggest for me more languages, can't think of all the possibilities, unless it's obscure in which case pick other. I say school because you can learn anything outside of it, I'm more curious what you learned in your earlier years.

French, only because I'm Canadian and basic French is required for almost every job.

In my country learning Danish in middle school+high school is mandatory. I always hated not having a choice in it since I saw no reason for me to learn danish but, I suppose you could add that to the list. It's also in the base of every college here to learn Danish, had really hoped I′d be rid of it when I was done with high school but I was wrong

As for Latin I suppose if you're going on any biology or medical courses and such you may want to learn Latin, not 100% sure though.

Besides my native language, I've studied english, german and japanese.

Dutch was mandatory, cuz we live here
English was told to be a must, and not to difficult for me :celebration:
German we learn on the streets here, because of the tourists. But I also took three years of it in highschool
French we had to take two years of, before dropping it like a bad habit..
Russian, in my last two years, because I saw it in the curriculum and had time on my hands since I wasn't going to English anymore -I just went for the exams.. they didn't actually have any russian classes at our school, so I got the books -and really funky record albums :goodjob: from a school in Amsterdam via our dean. funked miserably, but it was just for fun anyway..

8-10: Latin
11: Spanish
College: Arabic

(I'm in the US, that's probably worth noting )

I think learning a second language is extremely important, if only to learn about language in general - there are some things that make far more sense when you can step back from it, and it's hard to step back from your native tongue. In terms of practicality Latin isn't as overtly useful as many other languages, but in some contexts it's very handy and if you ever learn a Romance language you'll start with a solid foundation in the grammar and vocabulary.

You didn't vote for Dutch or English did you ? Because ones home language and English are a bit of a given, just saying.

Also thought I′d add that if I had the choice I′d like to learn Japanese for a handful of silly reasons.

Learned Spanish as a 2nd language in HS so I wouldn't have to learn it in college. Latin I don't find super useful and only learned a little bit of it when I was having to do classifications of animals, plants, fungi, etc... . Right now if you live in the US the 2nd language to learn from what i've been told is spanish. Biggest problem is there is "Spanish" Spanish spoken by people from Spain and "Mexican" Spanish spoke by people from well Mexico.

I never took a class in school, but I am very interested in learning Swedish.

Generally speaking, learing a second language is useless unless one of two things occurs;

1) You like learning languages and believe in the hypothesis that each language partially hardwires the brain into a mode of thinking, so multiple languages will give you multiple modes of thinking.

2) You actually need it as part of your job/daily life.

In the US, Spanish is a common second language because latinos (anyone from the south of the US, but not accross the oceans, basically) all speak spanish and a smattering of english (unless they're well-educated or born here), and have recently become the most common minority in certain areas. In Europe, German/French/Italian are popular (and more than just one is learned) because there's a high chance on any given day that you'll meet someone from one of those countries.

Latin, however, is absolutely worthless unless you're translating a medieval version of the bible, or specalize in roman history/archaeology. Nobody speaks it (which is why it's the default language of science for describing biological stuff) and the liklihood of you needing it outside of those two on a day-to-day basis is virtually nil.

Oh silly me, I really should have allowed multiple votes. I do find interesting though that almost everybody learns at least one of the Romance languages, right?

I checked Spanish, which I took for 5 (?) years. However, I originally started my education in non-English speaking countries, which made English my foreign language. None of my languages (Russian, Spanish, German) have any practical, real-world applications at this point :shrug: I do feel smarter, though, and can better appreciate other cultures, don't have to rely on google translate, and am a better reader (cognates, and stuff).

I know English but wish I knew other languages everyday.

I can sing some songs and say a few phrases in Athabaskan. I can speak a very tiny amount of spanish and I can ask someone to pee in a cup or receptacle in about 30 or 40 languages (dependent upon how good my memory is that moment).

But I can tell you that I could make some money around here during tourist season if I knew some other languages. And many more opportunities are available to those who can speak several languages.

Latin is important because it's the basis of so many varied languages.

Ojibwe.

It is not worthless.

I studied Latin in high school. I learned more about English grammar in my Latin classes than I ever have in any of my English classes. Ever. You learn very basic stuff in English classes, but you don't get into any of the hard grammar problems that come naturally to a native speaker of a language.

Because Latin is focused on grammar so much more than speaking, you get a great opportunity to study a language for its inner-workings, and you can really expand your horizons linguistically.

I feel like my knowledge of Latin made it much easier for me to learn German, since German also has the case-based noun system. And a lot of the grammar rules in German are similar to ones in Latin, even though it isn't a Romance language.

I am currently learning Korean, and all of the linguistics that naturally come in any Latin class have helped me even with an Asian language.

Just sayin'. If you want to learn more than one language, learn Latin first.

I'm not sure how useful latin is nowadays (it being a dead language and all :shrug:). Personally I've learned Portuguese (obviously), English (also for obvious reasons), Spanish and French, although I'm not very fluent in the last two - enough if I needed to live in a place that speaks either Spanish or French though.

Took 6 years of Latin. It helped with vocabuary, and would obviously help if you were going into a medical career, but other than that there isn't much. Currently taking German a year in.

I want to learn Russian, Irish/Scottish Gaelic, German, Polish, and Norwegian but sadly we don't have any of those classes here besides spanish. Any advice where to get started probably German at best.

I did french for years at school, I can only remember some of it, I did german for a year or so as well and have pretty much completely forgotten it, I did a few Russian evening classes but didn't really do enough to learn anything, and a few weeks of latin at school which I can't remember either.