 All right, welcome to lunchtime with Luke in this video. I'm gonna talk about why you should learn Latin Maybe a little bit of how you should learn Latin, but why you should learn Latin? So Latin was actually the first language I learned. I mean besides English, but the first language I actually sat down and learned I Actually learned it. I guess I was around high school or something I think I had arbitrarily signed up for a Latin class But of course you never learn Latin from class or anything from class classes are useless just drop out But I signed up for a class a Latin class just randomly because I had to take a language and my dad gave me an old Latin book. It was like a hundred years old I think it belonged to a grandfather or a great uncle or something like that it was Collar Daniels Latin or beginning Latin or something like that and Basically, I ate that book up and I learned Latin really quick and it was one of the best investments of my life It's been I guess, you know 10 years nearly since that maybe more And that is one of the things I just militantly do not regret We'll just put it that way and I want to explain why Latin was such a great thing now first Let's talk about why how either the ancients and how people several hundred years ago looked at Latin to sort of get get at why it's worth learning so You know medieval people I guess sort of you know around a thousand or something like that or even before that They looked at Latin not really as being a language. It's important to remember So like you didn't take everyone back then who was worth anything and still today learns Latin But they didn't learn it as in Latin classes They learned it in grammar classes because how people back then looked at it keep in mind that you know There are a bunch of languages that descend from Latin Spanish and French and Italian and learning Latin is going to increase your understanding It's going to make learning those languages absolutely facile. It's going to be the easiest thing in the world but Latin wasn't really thought of as being the ancestor language back in the day Latin was more thought of as an abstraction You didn't take Latin classes. You took grammar classes because when you learned Latin people looked at it as being a more loyal Reflection of the reality of grammar in the mind in as a logical structure and everything else And there's a sense in which that is true now There are some linguists nowadays who will pretend that all languages are equal in the same and everyone should just hold hands and sing Come by kumbaya, but that's not true Languages are very different and what separates Latin from a language like English or you know French and Italian and all the romance languages is that You know in the process of learning Latin, especially when you're learning it explicitly You know when well if you compare learning the grammar of English or you know The garbage you learn in English class about grammatical rules or something like that those all just seem like arbitrary things We you know force ourselves to do in English and most of them are most of them do not matter for actually speaking English But when you study something like Latin or you know any kind of ancient language Latin is probably the easiest ancient language for you to learn But when you study a language like them like this and you see the massive amount of inflections You see the morphology of it you see the you see the Grammatical aspects of the language make a lot of sense why they're there what they actually do they're not Arbitrary like they are in English Now as I said a second ago I do think that Latin is one of the easiest languages for you to learn as an English speaker Often because you know that typically when you learn a language Now if you're a normal person out there who doesn't know anything about learning languages You might think that learning a language is an issue about learning a bunch of words You know learn if you want to learn Spanish you just learn the Spanish words for everything. That's not that's not how it works It's really the grammatical Inflections how you actually say things and actually working it in your head how to actually say and interpret things not just learning words In fact learning the vocabulary is probably the least important aspect and probably the most annoying aspect Because sometimes it requires a bunch of memorization Now the reason I say Latin is relatively easy is because Latin Vocabulary is going to be very easy for you to learn as an English speaker In fact, it's really hard to find a Latin word that there is not some English descendant of or there's some Word that's changed and be been re-borrowed all of the vocabulary you have in Latin There's some kind of easy mnemonic device to learn it So when you actually learn Latin what you're doing what you're at the actual stuff You're adding to your brain that's making it quote-unquote difficult, but really it's the edifying learning portion Is you are learning the grammar per se that is the rules behind it What all these things what dative case means well how it's actually used what an ablative absolute of is You're learning about verbal inflections how they're used So you learn this sort of distilled grammar without a lot of effort and what you come out with is a lot of knowledge Not just of an important ancient language that is actually extremely useful and I'll talk about why But you also learn you also it's basically the equivalent of getting at least an undergraduate degree in linguistics In fact since I you know know a bunch of linguistics graduate students I will tell you that one of the big divides for me how I judge people. I mean this isn't this isn't like Prejudice it's just after time. I've realized that this is the case. There's a big divide in between Who came through linguistics through? I don't know something like reading a Steven Pinker book. Those guys are basically brainlets But who came to linguistics through Latin now? Those are the big brain people those are the people who know what they're talking about and they also have good Intuitions when they're either learning languages or they're making generalizations about languages because often You learn Latin and you have this massive grammatical knowledge You know basically all the the terms you need to know first off to understand any kind of language But Latin is often often a gateway drug to other drugs like classical Greek. Oh, I need some of that I need my fix. Oh, I need to learn Sanskrit. Oh, man. Let me get some of that in my veins Oh god now. I'm just gonna learn Indo-European It's gonna be better and better and each one gets easier and easier because the knowledge is more compounding In fact, you know when you get to something when you get to something like learning like learning like Latin is nice And you know thousands of years of teaching it. We have gotten a very systematized learning Latin is pretty Easy or pretty pretty systematized pretty efficient, you know But then you learn Greek and it's a little disorganized or Sanskrit is a little more disorganized if you learn it You know from an English book, but then you learn Indo-European and everything falls into place and everything works So anyway, right now, I've been making the case in terms of how it increases your knowledge. It makes you better generally as a mental habit To learn Latin, but it's also in terms of what is written in Latin. It is fantastic to know now A lot of people will associate Latin with you know, the classics you can read the classics and that that's true That's why a lot of people learn them, but I will say that for me What has been far more useful is the stuff written after the classical era the stuff That's written in the medieval period or the Renaissance period and I say this because you know one thing This is like a red pill 101 about history The things you learn in history books are a very small segment of what's going on when they're talking about the important Documents written the important thinkers all this kind of stuff You're getting a like what people nowadays happen to remember and that's gonna change in 10 years That's gonna change 10 years ago. It was totally different So the reality is during this period, you know, let's say me, you know when I was doing linguistics research There there are so many ideas that come up as we think we think these formal ideas are totally new We came up with these brilliant ideas but then you read these documents written in the medieval period and Which are all written in Latin and there's no translation of them There are a couple major works translated, but I'm talking about the real stuff. That's hard to find You know, there's no you read that kind of stuff and you realize how non insane these people were that they Pretty much saw everything that exists nowadays It's already they've already noticed that they already know about it and it's there usually written in Latin So there are all these kind of there's so many times in my life where You know, I look to these either medieval or sometimes Renaissance stuff written in Latin that there's no translation of there's not gonna be a Translation of and you find all this great stuff Someone I've talked about on my channel before is actually the economist Joseph Schumpeter now Schumpeter he also knew Latin I mean, he's not known for that, but he wrote a history of economic thought I forget exactly the what the books title was it might have been history of economic thought where he actually read Some medieval and Renaissance literature written in Latin that really no one was out there I mean it was out there But no one really knew about it because it was written in Latin and he discovered all kinds of stuff He just discovered presidents to all kind of modern ideas And that so, you know, I think even redditors know better than to say that there was a dark age I think people understand that that's like a public, you know a popular myth There's no such thing as a dark age. People didn't forget things people didn't you know, at least intellectually There were demographic changes, but there weren't intellectual changes really just that entire period where people were writing in Latin Modern people are just too dumb to read often times and once you start reading it you realize wow, there's like an entire it's like it's like uncovering like another universe and Seeing all this great stuff that's written in it and just being amazed that like so many people don't know It's out there, you know, some of the best works of Western philosophy You know people think oh wow The classics are great or wow the Enlightenment man That's like brain lit here, you know if you if you like that stuff But the scholastics man the middle in the Middle Ages Those are the biggest brain people out there and even if we don't remember a lot of these guys they had a huge influence and Reading that stuff in Latin is great. So anyway, that's just been a minor thing and keep in mind I didn't you know want to study in it any of that stuff when I learned Latin I had no idea I was doing it sort of for fun because I enjoyed it But once I did that I realized wow, there's all this stuff that is like quasi hidden For hidden from view hidden from modern people But it is it's great and you can get a whole lot of stuff out of it and I mean I've only scratched the surface even in terms of the The fields that I'm I've went in the fields that I'm interested in so anyway I will say how do I recommend learning Latin now? I will say there is an advantage for some people to learning Latin because there are no speakers native speakers of Latin So you don't have to you know if you're a little nervous about learning a language Latin might be a good place to start because you don't have to worry about you know people laughing at you because basically everyone I mean it's rare for people to actually speak it some autists do But it's rare for people to speak it and you don't need to feel like you can go at is go at it as Mentalistically as possible if you want if you prefer that method now when I was learning Latin I will say you know, I was in a mindset You know lat for a period Latin, you know when I was around 16 or so Latin Just was like everything I did. I mean I wasn't like that much of a nerd about it But you know when I was out in the wild I would if I heard a song in my head I would translate it into Latin just as a mental exercise or you have to you have to sort of Be in that state where you're starting to think in it. You're starting to really be able to use the language That I find that a very helpful mental habit But in terms of what books to use to learn Latin again, I think I mentioned at the beginning of the video I learned Latin from color Daniels book, which is around a hundred years old in general if you want to learn Latin or Ancient Greek as well or a classical language get a book that was written at least 50 years ago That would be nice because all of those books. They're all written in a stand a a format that's obsolete because you know There's new stupid ideas about how languages should be taught But all of them, you know have the format that worked for centuries and it's fantastic You should look into them, you know, again, I use color Daniel But I don't actually compared to all the other Latin books of that period. It's pretty normal. It's nothing that special There is one contemporary series that I do recommend and people have asked me about I think I've mentioned on the channel before and That is Hans Orberg series lingua Latina per se ilustrata, which means the Latin language taught through itself Now, I don't know I I was introduced to this series after I began learning Latin I don't know if you could only use this book But I think it is a really nice book to have because what this is What his series is is basically graduated readers that are designed to make it really easy to Like you can just open the book which is entirely in Latin Open to the first chapter and if you know English you will be able to read the first chapter It is so graduated that you know, the Latin text is something extremely easy for you to read it explains all the vocabulary in the margins with pictures and all the other kind of stuff and Again, the book is written entirely in Latin But it is such it is so well designed that you can actually you you know begin reading just from it now I don't necessarily recommend just using this book I think you should have a more traditional grammar book that you know explains grammatical points to look at Simultaneously, but I find it lingua Latina per se ilustrata is really nice for You know just sort of practicing reading and acquiring the language more naturalistically So that's something to look into and there are also audio recordings for at least the foot first book You can definitely find them on torrents. You might be able to find them There might be some place where like they're officially selling them, but you should check those out as well So anyway, there are other reasons to learn Latin But those are just the ones that popped into my head, you know at first But I strongly recommend it if you have any questions about it You can feel free to ask you should learn Latin and then see where it takes you May it might take you to learn Spanish and French and Italian Because those will be extremely easy once you learn Latin may take you to learn other ancient languages like ancient Greek Gothic Sanskrit all the other Indo-European languages That Latin is also useful for it may take you to you know do stuff in linguistics Either way Latin is the best starting point for a whole bunch of different things that you don't even expect You don't even you might not even expect Latin will give you something But it's one of those things that I discovered and I am continually You know reaping the benefits of learning it. So anyway, that's all I'm gonna have to say in this video And I will see you guys next time