Why Learn Latin?

Before endeavoring on such a great task as learning Latin, you ought to have strong reasons to motivate you and bolster your morale as you run into hurdles in your study. I am no salesman, and frankly nothing a salesman - including Latin teachers - can say will keep you motivated long enough to achieve this goal. I suggest you yourself compile a list of reasons why you want learn Latin - perhaps bullet points with one or two sentences explaining each point - so you are motivated and informed about this long-term task set out before you. Feel free to research reasons. Just make sure you truly believe whichever ones you write down. Learning Latin, like learning any language, is a goal that is years away; that said, learning Latin, like many goals that are years away, is extremely valuable.

To help jog your mind, I have written below my own reasons for learning Latin. Some of these reasons have been here from the start; others I only realized after gaining new perspectives as I proceeded farther along.

• Makes you a top tier philologist.
  This is the main benefit of choosing the grammar-heavy pedagogy over the modern pedagogy. You will learn how to parse sentences for their grammar and explain the nuance of using certain forms of words over others. The deeper into Latin literature you go, the more knowledgable you will become about literary traditions, prosidy, and interpretations.
• Opens up most of Western Literature to you.
  For most of history, the literature of Western Europe was written in Latin - from the early Romans to Riemann. If you can read Latin, all of this is opened up to you, including the works that are not on the minds of translators and will probably never be translated.
• Never have to rely on some translator's interpretation of a text.
  The interpretation of a translator can have very subtle effects on how a work reads, and it is easy to get it slightly off. Translators always have to balance readability of their translation with what the actual text says, partly due to the differences in English and Latin grammar, partly due to the vast difference in the why we think today compared to the past. For example, a translator of the Aeneid will have to figure out a way to translate the Latin word pietas which does not exaclty mean our English "piety." Pietas is not only your duty to God (or gods), but also your duty to your country and family. The closest thing we have today is perhaps "duty." Translators also struggle to get the full force of rhetorical figures. May God guide them if they dare to translate into meter.
• Linguistic Intuition
  Not only does learning Latin, for obvious reasons, give you a good intuition when you are learning Romance languages in both grammar and vocabulary, but also of Germanic, Hellenic (so just Greek), and Slavic languages, because you will be introduced to grammatical inflection and build a mental apparatus in your mind that you can easily use as a template for these other languages. Furthermore, you get a crash course in linguistics as you learn Latin. You will be introduced to morphology, phonology, and syntax with strong examples from Latin, giving you a good intuition to make strong basis for further study.
• Expanded Vocabulary
  Latin teachers always put this reason first whenever they are peddling Latin to naive middleschoolers, and I cringe to think that this was the only reason I chose Latin over French or Spanish, but is absolutely true and very helpful. (Although I am eternally grateful to Latin teachers for guiding me towards and through Latin, they are not authorities on the benefits of Latin, considering almost all have never even read the Aeneid in Latin cover to cover. The same could be sad for most professors as well, sadly) For example, it is quite clear what the English word "dorsal" means when you know that the Latin word "dorsum" means "back (of the body)" and "-al" is a common Latinate adjectival suffix.
• Well Read
  At this point, I am probably more well-read in Latin than I am in English, at least in terms of what are consider canonical classics.
• Scholarships and competition prizes
  If you are in highschool or college, the pickings are fresh for someone who is excellent at Latin. You can win competitions on the national level and there are plenty of Classics departments starving for strong students to whom they can award scholarships. It is also because of Latin that I am getting to spend a summer in Greece on full scholarship (by the generosity of the University of Tennessee - Knoxville Classics department).
• Niche Market
  There is plenty of room for creation and selling of materials in the Latin market, especially of those materials that aim for cultivating genuine fluency in the language.
• Latin has been the single most beneficial thing I have ever learned.
  All of these above culminate in this final reason. I am continually reaping rewards for cultivating this wonderful skill.

How to Learn Latin.
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