My penmanship was always terrible, but it's nigh unreadable anymore as even the few things that I did have to do have been replaced not limited to, but including: 1. Write a check - replaced by online banking 2. Take notes in business meetings - replaced by Audio Notes on my iPad And like many others I have no clue what my best friend's cellphone number is, but I can still tell you his parent's home phone number from 20 years ago.
Yeah, growing up I had a string of teachers who swore that in the next level of education teachers wouldn't accept piss poor handwriting like mine and just flunk me for the given assignment. By the time I reached college 99.9% of reports and papers were typed out. The remaining .1%, were those damn Blue Book in class essays. Even still with my wholly unreadable handwriting I never once was flunked for it.
I became an engineer so people had low expectations of my penmanship (it was that or medical school.)
If by penmanship you mean cursive writing, you may as well learn to hitch a team of oxen or light a coal stove. It is archaic. Arguments for cursive (http://abcnews.go.com/US/end-cursive/story?id=12749517) ignore the fact that cursive isn't the only form of writing by hand - there is also something called printing that we are all pretty familiar with. If you have written a Q or a Z in cursive you know that these bear little or no resemblance to the modern English alphabet representations that are supposed to be their equivalent.
At least Latin can help with reading comprehension and analogies for standardized testing. Plus when you want to sound really pretentious in mixed company.
People always say this, but is there any actual proof of this beyond the encouragements of Latin teachers? Does Latin really significantly improve English vocabulary, or is it that the people who pick up Latin voluntarily are already kind of nerdy and bookish? I actually feel the opposite. The internet has been instrumental in figuring out how to write a well-crafted sentence. Places like here give ample opportunity to develop the ability to write for wit and clarity, and I'm pretty sure I write better essays for that reason. Focus: My Morse code has gone to shit.
Good question and for myself it's hard to pull much correlation as I had Latin in 8th grade, but I also had weekly vocabulary tests from 6th grade to 11th grade. So I might myself be guilty of just spreading bullshit here.
I despise acedemia more than pretty much anyone else on this board, but I feel like my grasp on language in general improved DRAMATICALLY by taking Latin. I can't quantify it, I can't point out specifics, but I felt like I went in to that class like the equivalent of a soccer mom's knowledge on cars and came out like someone that while not exceptional could probably do their own oil change and understands how an engine works. I still think anyone that majors in it is a fucking moron though, it's like getting a four year degree in Thesaurus use.
I feel my Latin studies helped prepare me for more complex English vocabulary, not to mention the help it was in learning French and Spanish.
Agreed. Studying Latin will expand your conception of language unimaginably. It improves your vocabulary, yes, but more importantly it makes you think about deeper facets of language. For example, why do both 'capable' and 'encapsulate' both have the Latin rout 'cap' in them? I don't really want to figure out why, but just the notion that those words are somehow connected opens up this giant ant farm of underground tunnels that connect seemingly disparate words into gargantuan Latin-derived clusters. It develops one's ear for obfuscation-- the employment of excess verbiage descending from Latin origin makes you sound way more pretentious than if you pick words rooted in German. And Latin prose is, for the most part, rigorously lucid and formal-- it's a great lesson in the employment and economy of form. That's just the tip of the iceberg. And it lets you figure out what 'defenestrate' means without going to the dictionary.
Aside from the benefits to building vocabulary, I found studying Latin to be a great learning discipline. And then it just became fun to translate Cicero and Ceasar from their original texts. We didn't have a choice. All students had to take two years of Latin. I took four, plus three years of Classical Greek and two years of Italian. I can order a 5 course meal in Mario's with the best of them. One guy from my high school majored in classical languages at Vanderbilt and was recruited by the CIA. That was the last we'd heard of him.
Granted I suck at languages but after 3 years of Latin all I can remember is Amo Amas Amat, Amamus Amatis Amant and yes I did google it to make sure it was correct. My Latin teacher was pretty hot in a bookish way. I read outside of work all the time and write for work so perhaps it rubbed off somehow. As a technology manager I study different technology for my job so I think it keeps my brain pretty active. At least I'm interacting with something rather than watching TV although I suppose that same logic could be applied to gamers. I was consistently kept after in grammar school because of my spelling and penmanship. All of a sudden in 5th grade I figured out the spelling but the penmanship never followed.
Rome ruled Europe for a long fucking time. After the empire collapsed Christianity adopted latin and ruled Europe for a long fucking time. If you wanted to be an intellectual you had to learn latin. People literally went into churches and had no idea what was being said, but this is why you see latin influencing so much in science. This is especially true with biology. Also, the romance languages are direct descendants of latin, and other languages, like English are influnced by romantic languages. No shit latin is a good language to learn even it isn't common anymore. I had a friend who spoke 6 languages fluently, and german (not so latin based) semi-fluently by the time he was 17. He always referred to latin as the language that helped him figure other languages out. I speak no latin whatsoever so take my logic for what it's worth.