Why To Learn Latin

Basically, because it makes you smarter. You will also understand more of the world around you. Here's what Dorothy Sayers said about Latin in the The National Review.

Latin is the key to the vocabulary and structure of the Romance languages and to the structure of all the Teutonic languages, as well as to the technical vocabulary of all the sciences and to the literature of the entire Mediterranean civilization, together with all its historical documents.

Dorothy Sayers, The National Review

Latin and the SAT

Studies conducted by the Educational Testing Service show that Latin students consistently outperform all other students on the verbal portion of the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT).

    1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003*
Latin   647   651   662   665   665   666   559
All Students   505   505   505   505   506   504   507
French   623   627   632   636   633   637   524
German   624   617   623   621   625   622   536
Spanish   581   583   590   589   583   581   501
Hebrew   629   634   636   623   628   629   563

1997-2002 Taken from Tables 7-3 & 7-4 in College-Bound Seniors — A Profile of SAT Program Test Takers.
2003 From Table 3-3 in College-Bound Seniors — A Profile of SAT Program Test Takers.

* 2003 Scores are recentered


Latin and your GPA: College Grade Point Averages

A study of freshman college student performance conducted by the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 1985 yielded the following results:


Language GPA
Latin Students 2.89
No Foreign Language 2.58
Spanish Students 2.76
German Students 2.77
French Students 2.78

Latin and Reading Achievement in English

In the District of Columbia, elementary school students who studied Latin developed reading skills that were five months ahead of those who studied no foreign language and four months ahead of those who studied French or Spanish. Two years earlier, the same students had been excluded from foreign language classes because of substandard reading performance.

Vocabulary Skills

In Philadelphia, students in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades received 15 to 20 minutes of daily instruction in Latin for one year. The performance of the Latin students was one full year higher on the Vocabulary Subtest of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) than the performance of matched control students who had not studied Latin.

Latin and Math Problem Solving

Sixth-grade students in Indianapolis who studied Latin for 30 minutes each day for five months advanced nine months in their math problem solving abilities. In addition, the students exhibited the following advances in other areas:

Latin and the GRE

Does Latin help the GRE? The long chart of GRE scores of college seniors "who tested between 1 Oct. 1996 and 30 Sept. 1999" is called "General Test Percentage Distribution of Scores Within Intended Broad Graduate Major Field". There are 270 or so of those fields. The fact there most useful for Classics propaganda is that in Verbal, classics is # 1 out of 270 fields! Only one other field (History of Science) comes within even ten points of us.

Below are listed only those fields that scored 550 or more on the Verbal score (i.e. have a mean of at least 550). Most fields don't even score 500. The lowest is something called "Taxation" which scored 376 -- followed by "Educ Super" = 396.

FIELDS WHOSE STUDENTS SCORED HIGHEST IN MEAN "VERBAL" GRE.

Verbal Quantitative Analytical
Latin 605  590  614 
Classics  604  594  622 
Hist.of Sci. 595  631  649 
Semitic lang. 587  572  590 
Comp. Lit.  586  580  604 
Philosophy  583  605  624 
Russian  567  586  620 
Eur. Hist.  564  550  600 
English  561  533  583 
Planetary sci.  559  699  651 
Paleontology  551  620  629 
American lit. 551  536  580

And After All ... Ancient Greek and Latin Are the Original Languages of Western Civilization

By learning these languages students acquire the ...