It is amazing how many people are now defending learning Latin in school. This blog post points out its fantastic benefits in learning English grammar and vocabulary. I found it to be very well written and to the point. Honestly, even though I work day in and day out promoting Latin, it nearly knocked my socks off with its straight-forwardness. It is well worth the read.

But Latin teaches something much greater than the English language when a student learns it early: critical thinking skills. The effort a student must put into analyzing grammar forms and then synthesizing them into a translation forces that student to start thinking in an organized, systematic way.

Modern languages like Spanish or Portuguese just don’t do the job. Since their nouns and adjectives are not declined as they are in Latin, the student misses the whole exercise of learning the parts of a sentence–and consequently miss the majority of the critical thinking development.

What other benefits do you see to learning Latin?