“A Great Ox Stands on My Tongue”: The Pitfalls of Latin Translation
I have mixed feelings about Latin. Excuse my lengthy rambling about the German school system.<p>In many German high schools (at least the highest or &quot;Gymnasium&quot; level which is kind of a hillarious name if you are an English speaker but I digress) the first foraign language is English starting in the 5th grade which is basically the first year in the new school (years 1-4 are &quot;Grundschule&quot;). Then in 7th grade you typically have a choice of Latin or x (x=French in my case).<p>I picked Latin on the vague notion that I might study law, medicine, archeology or some other topic where it&#x27;s a requirement in the future and because the teacher said it&#x27;s great for people who like to think structured and logically. It was also marketed as being a very usueful base for learning other languages later. French also didn&#x27;t appeal to me because my thinking at that age was &quot;I&#x27;ll never go to France so it&#x27;s useless&quot;.<p>Then in 9th grade there&#x27;s the option to take a 3rd language or some other topic (I belive things like sociology etc. are on the table). By the time I reached 9th grade I already hated Latin because it was just rote drilling of stuff and then translating texts. The only thing that made it acceptable was the random sideffect of Romean&#x2F;Greek history and mythology which I enjoyed. But I figured...well, well, well now that I suffered through Latin at least French will be easier so I picked French. My mindset had also changed a bit and I figured spoken languages might actually be useful.<p>However, it turned out that I was way more into sports, hanging out with friends and programming at the time than investing time in French so I started slow, lacked vocabulary and was always lagging behind somehow and lost all motivation (but once again I told myself, I&#x27;ll likely never need it so I&#x27;m fine). I also made up my mind that I wanted to be an exchange student in the U.S. so I poured my energy into improving my English from a D to an A. The magic of motivation and watching late night comedy on NBC Europe.<p>11th grade rolled around, I spent it in the U.S., had a blast, returned to Germany and there was a only a slight academic problem. The last year of Latin is the 11th grade and after that you get a shiny certificate which is good for studying medicine and the like. Since the grade is a combination of class participation and written exams almost noone fails this and a D- passing grade is fine since it doesn&#x27;t influence any graduating GPA or anything. So in order to get this certificate I had to take half a year of Latin with three people (exchange students returning) during 12th grade and then a 1 on 1 oral exam with the teacher and a written exam...a lot harder than the typical 11th grade stuff. All fine and well except I broke my wrist playing football (the American variety which I started playing when I came back) a couple of weeks before the exam. I then had a choice of &quot;figure out a way to take the exam or repeat the Latin 1 on 1 next year or drop Latin&quot;. I wrote as much as I could, it was quite painful I got a horrible grade (5- in German so basically almost an F) but thankfully aced the oral exam to get a combined D and the great certificate. Fast forward to my current life and I never needed this certificate...I did however work in France for two years so yeah, life choices :P<p>All that rambling aside, I do feel it was actually a good decision to study Latin. The grammer pops up in other languages and things sometimes just make sense. There&#x27;s also the strange notion of just knowing vocabulary in other languages and being able to sort of kind of understand what people are saying (in Spanish and Italian) and it did help with re-learning French. Would I recommend it to my 5th grade self again...no idea. The exposure to Plato and Aristotle also sort of started my interest in philosophy if science which I consider the biggest positive from the entire experience. If I were to reform schools I&#x27;d probably make the choice Latin or &quot;non European language&quot; (Chinese, Arabic whatever). I&#x27;m currently learning Vietnamese and it&#x27;s a very interesting experience because there is no base set of somewhat known vocabulary to fall back on like with English and French.