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I was taught 2 semesters of cold Spanish, but forgot most of it. Does learning Latin first make learning Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, etc. a whole lot faster or easier as some claim. They all stem from latin of course. Any studies on this?

superherosaves
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    @Oddthinking reopening, it's a common justification for teaching Latin in Italian high schools – Sklivvz Feb 12 '14 at 11:33
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    One confounding factor is that Latin is often taught as a written language, with little emphasis on conversation. Speaking vs. comprehension exercise different processes in the brain. Another interesting question would be: Does learning Latin first dramatically improve the ability to *comprehend* more languages? – ESultanik Feb 12 '14 at 19:13
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    There are several valid answers depending on how you look at it. Learning any language helps with learning languages in the future, because of experience. The advantage of latin is not so much that it's the root of a lot of european languages, but that it's a fairly complex language, learning it opens your mind to abstract grammatical concepts. Personally I always found grammar hard to grasp before I studied latin, and had a much easier time learning languages afterwards. That said, it's not unique to latin. – Tobberoth Feb 19 '14 at 15:12
  • Having had five years of Latin, I don't think it helped me learning other languages at all. And most definitely not to the point where I saved five years of learning time. I would have been a lot better off learning a living language like Spanish or French in that time with a chance of actually meeting living people speaking the language, plus a chance to make myself understood in Italy, Portugal or Brazil. Sometimes being able to decipher what's written on a gravestone doesn't quite compensate. – gnasher729 May 08 '14 at 16:31
  • Related: [Does knowing Latin help learning English?](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/13798/8192) – unor Oct 17 '15 at 17:48

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No, not according to this study. I wasn't able to find enough study on this to form a real basis for a literature review, but the outcome of the linked study was that, when teaching speakers of a non-latin based language spanish, those who learnt French first did better than those who learnt latin first.

The outcome is unsurprising in my opinion. Latin is indeed a base point for many languages such as French, Spanish and Portuguese, but none of these languages actually inherited such an extensive grammar, tense-structure or verb transformational system. Latin is complicated, and more complicated than it's 'offspring' in use today.

Although Latin is still taught in many schools, and Universities, this is more an exercise in learning than in language (and IMO is somewhat tradition over education). The University I attended and subsequently worked for is very traditional, and viewed Latin or Classics study as an advantage, not because Latin was particularly useful - one can easily get by without it - but because excelling at Latin shows an ability to study a complicated thing successfully.

To conclude, at least according to the referenced study, learning latin may help learn latin based languages, but learning a latin based language would too - and slightly better as it seems.

Owen C. Jones
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    Good answer. The people who get my sympathy are those trying to learn English, with all its borrowed words, numerous rules and exceptions, multiple meanings, and slang idioms. – Mike Dunlavey Feb 12 '14 at 15:42
  • Yes, ironically, the two most widely spoken languages in the world, Chinese and English, are also both some of the most difficult to learn, and English being the most commonly spoken second language, puts a fair pressure on people who don't speak it. – Owen C. Jones Feb 12 '14 at 16:33
  • It would be interesting to see if it helped at all with learning other languages with similarly complex grammars and declension systems, like Finnish, Icelandic, or Russian, for those people who do not have similar systems in their native language. – ESultanik Feb 12 '14 at 19:10
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    English is actually not that difficult to half-learn: you can make large numbers of errors and still be reasonably understood. Watching various English schoolboys doing a quick course in Italian, it seemed that those who had previously learned Spanish found it easiest, followed by those who had learned French, and then those who had leaned Latin. – Henry Feb 12 '14 at 22:23
  • @MikeDunlavey I think that's a great question for Skeptics, actually! The myth of English being one of the hardest languages to learn. If you haven't read it... The Language Instinct has some great anecdotal stories about exactly this. But measuring the difficulty of a language... I Think Russian and Thai are brutal, Cantonese and Japanese are easy to me. Cantonese and Japanese I often see as "the hardest" though, so I think its obviously a subjective rating at best. – AthomSfere Feb 14 '14 at 03:26
  • Cantonese would be interesting to learn as well. It seems as though I should learn the daughter languages from the get-go then. Thanks for all your help. – superherosaves Feb 16 '14 at 18:16
  • My brother learnt Cantonese, Mandarin and Korean, and he recommends learning korean first. – Owen C. Jones Feb 17 '14 at 10:33
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    @MikeDunlavey Most, if not all languages have borrowed words, rules, exceptions, slang and idioms. Nothing special about English here. IMO it's a very easy language to learn (I'm French), and I found it far easier than German and Italian. – Aeronth Mar 08 '14 at 21:20
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    @Mike Dunlavey, I actually always felt that English was quite easy to learn, definitely easier than French, a lot easier than Latin (I never met anyone speaking it fluently), about the same as Spanish. Dutch is just impossible to speak for me. What _did_ take a while was quickly understanding the bad English that you find on the Internet at times, if English is the second or third language, and "there", "their" and "they're" are totally different words for you. – gnasher729 May 08 '14 at 16:34