alt Hacker NewsI fully agree on phonics, but teaching Greek and Latin before any modern language? That seems deeply weird as an idea. Especially since Greek (by which I assume you mean Ancient Greek) is a pretty isolated language, with relatively little relation to any modern language except modern Greek. Another huge issue with Ancient Greek and Classical Latin is that they have extremely complex grammars compared to any modern European language, which makes them very daunting to English speakers especially.
Note also that Greek words used in English are almost exclusively scholarly words (like "metaphor", "diagnosis", "theology"), they are not popular borrowings like many Latin words ("difficult", "pork", "to count").
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In the US, it seems like malpractice to teach anything before Spanish IMO. 14% of the country are native Spanish speakers. It's hard to imagine a return on any other foreign-language instruction that would match improving communication between 45 million residents of the country and everyone else, to say nothing of improving communication with citizens of the other countries actually sharing a land mass with the US.
We had, spread over the course of our 8th grade English class (Thanks Ms Wilson), about 500 greek and roman roots to memorize, and weekly quizzes. These were not graded curricula, they were for extra credit because it was the teacher's personal program. No grammar, no conjunctions or conjugations, no sentence construction, just the two biggest veins that PIE has contributed to English nouns and verbs. Rote memorization.
I found I already could guess about 2/3 of them from being a recreational reader, but it helped a good deal even so. With the combination of a few years of Spanish and random etymological crawls through Wikipedia, I'm firmly in the top few percentiles of English vocabulary competence.
> Classical Latin [has] extremely complex grammars compared to any modern European language
…I know almost nothing about this topic, but this doesn’t line up with what people who know Latin have told me. They’ve frequently cited the language’s simple grammar as something they like about it.
I don't think they're talking about learning greek or latin before english, it sounds like they're talking about putting more time into learning etymology which is incredibly useful.
It's not even really about learning Greek or Latin as a true spoken language. It's about known the roots of the linguistics for understanding why a word is even created in the first place.
English is a really messy language but there are many simple underlying roots that can tell you what the word means with context clues after hearing it for the first time.
Also learning the International Phonetic Alphabet is probably another huge boon for comprehension, the nicer books often include IPA spelling for crazy off the rip words