Sodomy non sapiens

[andrewducker]

A friend of mine has a daughter at school and is wondering whether they should take Latin - whether they would find it actually useful later on for other subjects.  They think that it would be useful for science, and also for wanting to be a doctor or a vet.

Anyone got any opinions on this?

Comments

[skington.livejournal.com]

I took Latin for a couple of years, starting when I was 14, and hated it. (I should say that this was in France, where I'd been doing German for two years already, and I took it at the same time I started Spanish.) It's a really annoyingly finickity language with far too many cases and declensions. And it's not as if you'll end up being able to speak to anyone in the damn thing, something which makes learning a language bearable.

I can agree with posters who say that knowing the latin word helps you remember English spellings; I'd warrant, though, that the same thing would be true of any romance language (it's certainly true for French).