Latin is making a comeback in American schools.
The number of students in the United States taking the National Latin Exam has risen steadily to more than 134,000 students in each of the past two years, from 124,000 in 2003 and 101,000 in 1998…
Marty Abbott, education director of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, said it was possible that Latin would edge out German as the third most popular language taught in schools, behind Spanish and French, when the preliminary results of an enrollment survey are released next year. In the last survey, covering enrollment in 2000, Latin placed fourth.
I’ve been teaching myself Latin for the last couple of months. I’d always wanted to learn it and I’m enjoying doing so.
Ms. Abbott, a former Latin teacher, said that today’s Latin classes appeal to more students because they have evolved from “dry grammar and tortuous translations†to livelier lessons that focus on culture, history and the daily life of the Romans.
I actually love grammar, which is probably why I find Latin fun. Since I’m not in a classroom setting, I don’t know if I’d be able to hold conversations in it. But maybe the reading and writing is more important anyway.
In my Latin classes in college we never really had conversations, although my professor (who referred to himself as Flavius) gave us each Latin names that stuck with us in every subsequent class we took with him. I was Titus. Based on his name, I often like to extend it to Titus Flavius, which let me pretend I was the Emperor Vespasian. :)
Our exam questions, however, were all in Latin and he’d ask us to do things in Latin: e.g., if he wanted us to translate something into Latin or read aloud in Latin he’d say “Latine, quaeso.”
It was fun. I loved how he could take a discussion of a random word or grammar principloe and turn it into a rant/debate on some political or environmental issue.