Should my 8th grader take Latin or Spanish in High School?

Parent Cafe
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<p>Pick French. It is much easier to go from French to Spanish than the other way round. Spanish is a very easy language.</p>

<p>I continue to find it astonishing that people blithely accept kids ducking language study while they would be appalled if someone said their kid just didn’t like math or science and wanted to escape from HS with 2 years of each. I think it is very short-sighted.</p>

<p>It is also very short-sighted that the majority of our elementary schools fail to teach the ONE THING that we know is best acquired at an early age: language. It was the first thing on the chopping block here.</p>

<p>Pardon my rant. I will ride my hobby horse off into the sunset now. ;)</p>

42

<p>D took 4 years of Latin and 5 years of Spanish because our schools start HS language for credit in middle school. Schools are very impressed with Latin and Latin has been very useful in vocabulary and medicine. She gave up space in her schedule taking 2 languages, so you have to consider priorities and practicalities. I do believe Latin is the more impressive language to colleges, but Spanish may be more useful depending on your student.</p>

43

<p>I agree, Consolation! A couple of our public elementary schools now have language-immersion programs to get kids speaking Spanish as early as first grade, I believe. I wish we had had that opportunity when my kids were young.</p>

<p>I studied Latin in school and found it to be a good base for other languages I have dabbled in–French, Spanish and Italian. My son tried it at his high school but didn’t like the way it was taught (neither do a lot of people, including my classics-professor friend). Not much emphasis on grammar. So he switched to Spanish and has continued it in college. He is very excited to use it in South America this summer.</p>

44

<p>I haven’t read all the replies - why can’t you do two years of Latin and then two years of Spanish? Both have their own benefits, IMO.</p>

45

<p>There’s lots of good advice here. I’ll just say two things:</p>

<ol>
<li> If he’s a very visual, non-auditory learner, Latin would be better.</li>
<li> If he’s fine with the auditory part, he should take Spanish. I have heard friends who are doctors, nurses, pharmacists, teachers, salesclerks, and ministers say that they wish they were fluent in Spanish. (My computer programmer friends say the same for Mandarin and Hindi!) Some of them are taking Spanish classes right now. I would have liked to have known Spanish just to talk to the parents of some of my children’s school friends.</li>
</ol>

46

<p>Consider the EC opprotunities in both Spanish and Latin at your school. Which club has activities you would love to join in? Which go on trips? Latin Clubs generally have a huge academic component with competition - national tests, greek-roman-anciel-classic studies, art competitions, etc., but rarely do they get to go to Italy. Spanish may have student exchange programs, trips to many different countries, service opportunities, a larger group, both modern and ancient culture academics. Your child should ‘go with the gut’ on this one. Which one will she love more for the next 4 years?</p>

<p>I have S1 who took Latin 6th through 10th grade, then a year of French. He loved Latin and the one teacher until HS, when scheduling kept him from taking any music courses (he’d been in band since 3rd grade). Latin is always the language on the chopping block at budget time.</p>

<p>S2 took French 1st through 11th grades - a special program.</p>

47

<p>The reason not to do two years of each language, instead of four of one: </p>

<p>

from [Harvard</a> College Admissions § Applying: Preparing for College](<a href=“http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/preparing/index.html#language]Harvard”>http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/preparing/index.html#language)</p>

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<p>A doctor in the US should know Spanish. Every American should know Spanish. Millions of people speak Spanish. Latin is utterly useless. I studied Latin at HS and it has never been of any use. Anyone can remember any medical terms without the dumb extra effort of learning a dead language.</p>

49

<p>I studied Spanish, French, Catalan, Latin, and Hebrew in school, and have self-studied Russian and Italian. I am reasonably fluent in Spanish, a little less so in French, and have done graduate-level coursework in the literature of both languages. Both my kids took Latin in high school, one in conjunction with French (and she dropped Latin after three years), and the other initially in conjunction with Spanish, but he dropped the Spanish in favor of Latin.</p>

<p>There are two reasons to take Latin that haven’t been expressed clearly here. First, by tradition Latin is taught differently than any living language, especially Spanish. Latin is taught rigorously and systematically – you start learning the structure of the language on Day 1. As a result, studying Latin helps you understand the structure of many languages, including English. In theory, you could do the same thing with Spanish or French, but no one does. In Spanish classes, you tend to spend hours, months, years on accents, food, and inane conversations; in Latin, all of that is secondary to learning about tenses, conjugations, parts of speech, grammar, and syntax. Having studied Latin for only a few years has helped me learn new languages 3-4 times faster than would otherwise be the case.</p>

<p>Second, in Latin you get to the good stuff faster. The first month of Spanish, you wind up learning how to say “Juan and Maria go to the store. They buy milk.” At the equivalent point in Latin, we were doing “Marcus Manlius invades Gaul and carries off the women.” And by Latin III, students are reading real literature and historical documents, not pabulum. The quality and interest level is really high. By contrast, in my daughter’s French III class, at the end of the year they finally got to a “real” book – Le Petit Prince, a somewhat charming but basically insipid novella written for children and childlike adults – and spent almost two months on it (two hours being about the amount of attention it can bear).</p>

<p>Now, of course there are reasons to take Spanish, too. And ultimately, your decision should probably be based not on anything about either language, but on the strength of the faculty who will be teaching your son. You really can’t go wrong going with the best teachers.</p>

<p>Finally, I agree 100% with mathmom and Harvard: Whatever you do, take at least one language for four years (or more). Especially with Spanish and French, if you don’t get to at least the fourth level, or the AP level, you are missing essentially all of what make learning the language worthwhile. You don’t have to do that with every language you study, but you have to do it with one so you know what to look for with others.</p>

50

<p>JHS, that may be a problem with the way French is taught in high schools now. In my first year of high school French we read Le Petit Prince and* Le Petit Nicholas*. Second year we read* L’Etranger* and other stuff, third year we read* Lettres de mon Moulin* and other stuff. I can’t remember all the “other stuff”, but I know it included poetry -(Rimbaud, Verlaine, Appolinaire etc.), and plays (Moliere, Racine etc.) and probably a couple more novels. The big fat 19th century novels were all in AP French though.</p>

<p>I can’t disagree though, that Latin probably teaches grammar a bit more rigorously - about the only thing that has been helpful to my poor non-language kid in his struggles with Arabic.</p>

51

<p>Nothing looks better than the other. But, people who take Latin do tend to score higher on SATs and such. </p>

<p>He really should just take what he enjoys. The colleges never ever care which language he took, just that he took a language.</p>

52

<p>And also, I do not buy in to the idea that everyone in America should know Spanish. EVERYONE in America should know English. I have Hispanic relatives who refuse to let their kids take Spanish. The schools took one look at their skin color and stuck their children in to the bilingual school where they really only spoke Spanish. That really struck a raw cord. Kids who are not taught English will end up mowing lawns and cleaning houses. And there is a sort of feeling by some in the Hispanic community that that is what that is what some people want. My brother actually had to go back to the schools and demand his daughter be pulled from the bilingual rooms and that they start speaking English to her and communicating in English to him. </p>

<p>I know more people who speak Russian, Finnish, and Chinese and are trying to learn English, than people who speak Spanish and cannot speak English. Spanish is the language to learn if you want to work in welfare. But even in missionary work, there is a shortage of people who can speak any language at all other than Spanish. Spanish is not even the most common language in the world.</p>

53

<p>For a student with a strong humanities bent Latin can offer a springboard into philosophy, art history, mythology. My S is now an Art History grad student and his knowledge of Latin and Classical Culture is useful to him everyday. His field is nineteenth century painting, specifically Monet, but in the early half of the nineteenth century so many classical themes are alluded to that he has a much easier time than his classmates. Can they learn the relevant material? Surely. But he has been studying Ovid, etc., since middle school and knows the material the way I know Shakespeare. For his work, his knowledge is invaluable.</p>

<p>Latin forms the basis of Western Culture (for years the Aeneid, not the Iliad and Odyssey were the generative texts of Western culture) and folks who want to study Medieval History, Religion or anything else that has these early roots would benefit from knowing Latin.</p>

<p>Of course, kids don’t know where they will end up when they make this choice.</p>

<p>Many schools offer an early “smorgasbord” course that allows kids to sample. The Latin scholar will probably know immediately who he/she is.</p>

<p>I studied French, not Spanish. I can pick up bits of Spanish, and particularly Italian because I’m a singer. However, I loved French and Paris so much that it has informed many things in my life. It’s not practical. I should know Spanish, but I wouldn’t trade the love affair I’ve had with French.</p>

<p>I agree with the argument that we should all know Spanish, but there should be actual bi-lingual education. I don’t think Spanish, as it is taught in the average classroom, gives students facility in spoken Spanish in most cases.</p>

<p>I think there are a few colleges, like Columbia perhaps, with a core curriculum that privileges the Latin student. In most cases, I agree that colleges will not weight the language studied in admissions. They may, however, care about what the student does with the language s/he studies.</p>

54

<p>Hoggirl, a lot of colleges would prefer to see 3-4 years of the same language. My daughter tried to switch from Spanish to Latin after this year and her GC said it would be a bad idea.</p>

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<p>I completely agree. I don’t feel hampered at all by not knowing Spanish.<br>
I wish I’d had the opportunity to take German and Latin, too. I did take a beginners course in German, and that’s one thing I want to do when I retire. Practicality isn’t the only reason to study a language.</p>

56

<p>Latin will help with the sats and roots for words, and definitely help with medical fields.
Spanish is more useful in real life and in the future of America.</p>

57

<p>In my daughter’s HS there are a lot of Spanish teachers but only one Latin teacher - the Latin teacher has a bad rep - however there were good and bad Spanish teachers - some kids started with Latin and changed because the one teacher was so bad and they did not want him for all four years.</p>

<p>The main thing is to stick to one particular language for four years (or through AP level).</p>

<p>If you are going to major in classics in college you will need both Latin and Greek - not many other non-language majors require a specific language.</p>

58

<p>My D had the same choice (between Latin and Spanish) in high school and took Spanish for “practical” reasons. She ended up regretting it because she is not particularly interested in Latin American or Spanish cultures and does not want to study abroad in a Spanish-speaking country in college. She is now taking German instead to fulfill her college language requirement and hopefully spend some time in Germany studying abroad her junior year. (She would have taken German in high school if it had been offered.)</p>

<p>Your son should take a language that represents a culture that he is interested in.</p>

59

<p>Classics programs, even at elite schools, now require Latin OR Greek. All encourage both, but few require them.</p>

<p>I wasn’t suggested that Latin was a requirement in other fields of humanities study, mere that it is often an advantage.</p>

<p>The best answer is that the kid makes the best guess of which language fulfills his/ her goals and preferences and jumps in. Like everything else, sometimes the kid is right, and sometimes the kid is wrong.</p>

60

<p>I have 3 kids</p>

<p>Oldest did Latin. His SAT/ACT scores were high and he attributes a good bit of it to know the root words because of Latin. It also has helped with some HS science projects as he can “really read” some of the “true” journals.</p>

<p>Child 2 is in middle school and chose Spanish because it is “an actual language” used in “too many places” in the US to ignore it.</p>

<p>Child 3 is in 6th grade. She plans on taking Latin because she loves mythology. </p>

<p>I will say, though we don’t have the means for the High School language side trips that are offered, trips to Rome sure seem like a nicer choice vs. the Spanish service trips to Latin America.</p>