I love you toooooo, you are the best! I hope you like whatever you hunt up — the Aeneid’s good! — and if you ever do have a chance to learn Latin, I recommend it so much. It’s a wonderful, elegant, excellent language. I wish we still had it as a lingua franca.

I went to public school! IDK it was very very fortunate. All the language teachers in middle school seem to have been awful — my friends who took Spanish and French were miserable — and most of the language teachers in my high school were also not great. Latin was a great choice because I loved it, but also because I got to have classes with one of the only good language teachers my school had.

I wish I could just give you my HS Latin teacher so that you could experience Latin that way! She just knew everything and was an amazing teacher and made it easy to love Latin. I would have loved it anyway, but I loved it better better best because of her.

Narrator: It was not.

Seriously, though, it wasn’t that high-faluting of a school district. The languages on offer seemed to heavily depend on what language teachers were available? We had Japanese in high school apparently only because one of the teachers there spoke Japanese. :p

LATIN IS THE BEST ALLEY THE BEST

Ha! That is a great point. I remember being annoyed that Cicero didn’t have more to say/do in Julius Caesar, especially given how closely his fate was tied in with Caesar’s, one way and another.

also, if you have any advice about how a person can teach herself more Latin after an introductory (supposedly graduate level) course where no teaching happened but a “Wheelock” workbook was filled out, please lay it on me. My daughter is trying to teach herself more Latin this summer–enough to be able to read the Vulgate on her own.

Don’t tell my husband. But this is perhaps the loveliest thing I’ve read in a long, long time. I have never actually wanted to learn Latin (and surprisingly, as a wordy person, I’ve read a lot about Latin and learning Latin and how Latin works and where it might fit in a curriculum and even short stories featuring kids in schools where THEY were learning Latin), but nothing has ever made me want to drop everything and LEARN Latin like this post. Oh, and also kick the shit out of my public school curriculum planners, who wasted my time with all sorts of bullshit classes that weren’t Latin. Really? Three years of phys. ed required (totally stupid for a farm kid who was getting more than enough of a workout at home, k thx) and no Latin?

Anyway. I won’t have time for Latin for some time but I might have to go look something up about Cicero. Thank you.