When you have been teaching Latin for fourteen years you get to see different students learn in different ways. You also see that there are general patterns from your own learning and teaching that you notice about learning Latin. Below I will write about three benefits of learning Latin.
Access ancient language
The first benefit of learning Latin is that you can access ancient knowledge without any need for an intermediary. Most of the works of the ancient Romans have been translated and you can find these translations in any bookstore. This is not bad. Translating is an important work that helps most people access the literature of the ancient world. But would you recommend reading Shakespeare, Steinbeck, or any great English author in a translation? You would have to say that the original is the best. The same with Latin. You can read Ovid’s Metamorphoses and read all the famous mythological stories and know them very well. But only by reading the original will you feel and understand the impact these stories have had over the last two thousand years. As good as a translation is it does not capture the feeling and emotion that the original author intended. You really are on getting what the translator thinks or interprets rather than reading on your own what the author wrote. You are then free to make up your own mind.
Improve grammar
The second benefit of learning Latin is that you improve your English grammar. How? English grammar is based on word order. The order of the words tells you what function each word does in the sentence. But Latin grammar is based on word endings. If you know Spanish or French you know the verbs will change their endings depending on the tense and the speaker. Latin does this also but the nouns also change their endings. For example in the sentence, “The dog sees the food” it is clear by the word order that the dog is the subject and the food is the direct object. “The food sees the dog” is an entirely different sentence. But in Latin the same can be written as:
canis videt cibum (keeping the English word order)
canis cibum videt (the more standard Latin word order)
cibum videt canis (here the direct object starts the sentence).
And whatever word you write in the sentence will still convey “The dog sees the food” as long as you write the words as they are spelled here.
What does this do to your reading and thinking? To answer this question we move on to the third benefit of learning Latin.
Improve thinking
It is well established that reading and writing both help to improve your thinking. But often when we read in our native languages we just read the words and do not think about them all that much. That is, we do not spend time analyzing the grammar, looking up definitions (at least not for most words), and keeping track of each sentence within each paragraph. Now, learning any language will force you to slow down in your reading. You have to stop every so often, look up a lot of words, figure out a difficult grammar point, or look up a figure of speech. In Latin, due to the nature of the grammar, you really have to stop and slow down often. An old Latin teacher once said that you should never just read the first words of a Latin sentence and think you know where it is going. Every Latin author has their own style and often plays with the word order as we saw above. So the trick is that you have to keep track of each word in the sentence. While doing that you have to sometimes hold those words and ideas until you get to the main idea of the sentence (usually signaled by the verb). Then and only then can you really get the meaning of each sentence, and sometimes a paragraph.
If you think about it, this mirrors “real world” thinking, that is, the thinking we do every day of our lives. As we go through our lives we keep track of various things, some we ignore, some we need to keep for later. We never are just doing one thing for the sake of that one thing. All we do is because of something else and is meant to become or turn into something else later on. This is how you should think of all reading and writing really. Latin really is the best language to train the mind in this way of thinking.
These are only three benefits of learning Latin. Each teacher will have their own particular ones. Each student will also have their own reasons and benefits. You can be sure though that these three in this article will appear at least once in almost every list of benefits of learning Latin.