Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

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Fluent or just basic? Personally I think it's not worth it unless you really commit to trying to get fluent. I "learnt" Latin + French at school and it's basically useless knowledge that's drifted away in the years, I can barely understand even the most basic French now.

As for knowing it fluently, my Mum and various of her friends are all Dutch living in the UK. Many of them earned some money from it in some way, including:

    - doing translations
    - getting jobs in the local port because they were bilingual 
    - teaching night classes in the language
    - emergency translator for customs

And that's Dutch, where even 20 years ago a lot of them spoke English fluently. It can be useful.

My friend's wife is a US Bulgarian who speaks French and got a grant from her uni to go to Bulgaria this summer to interview Bulgarian software companies (I think including Chaos/XCom maker Julian Gollop who lives there now).

Then again I know others who never use their 2nd or 3rd language.

Basically, it opens doors to experiences if you want to leverage it.

It baffles me how anyone can consider Latin 'useless knowledge'. I know of no other language which opens so many doors to so many European languages, and most certainly to English as a second one.

Latin grammar doesn't help you with English grammar, of course. Latin vocabulary can help you with English vocabulary, but the effort of learning Latin, then transferring that knowledge to English, is much larger than the effort of just learning English.

I had some Latin in school, and yes, from time to time it comes to mind when encountering a new French or Italian word. But even if you want to learn several Romance languages, I'd guess that just learning them and recognizing/exploiting relationships is easier than also learning Latin. It does add a common denominator, but it also adds a lot of cruft.

As a native Spanish speaker (who also speaks French and Italian and can read Portuguese), let me tell you:Latin is pointless. I'm sorry to be the one to break it to you. But that's the way it is.

Hear, hear! It can help with vocabulary, especially if you know a little bit about how things changed on their way to some Romance language you're trying to communicate in, e.g. working your way back from Spanish "hongo" to Latin "fungus" (the "f" -> "h" switch is pretty common, e.g. ferrum -> hierro, facere -> hacer).

I'm not saying per se Latin is useless, I'm saying that my half-hearted, school-forced attempt to learn it was worthless.

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