how helpful is Latin?

[kangar00]

I was just wondering how helpful it is to take a Latin class in terms of aid on the MCAT and in med school. any feedback would be really helpful!

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[Perrotfish]

Useless.

 

[petlee1]

well..seeing how no one really speaks it anymore..^

 

[familyaerospace]

I was just wondering how helpful it is to take a Latin class in terms of aid on the MCAT and in med school. any feedback would be really helpful!

Latin can be very useful. For my undergrad degree I had to take two introductory level courses and then attempt to test at the 300 level. Since no one speaks latin, the courses were focused on reading. Now I knew several languages were derived from Latin, but still it surprised me when I was exposed to several languages and I could read a good chunk of the words! One of the apps on my ipod is a brain atlas and I was going through that and seeing some of the words and I was able to say "Oh that makes sense since XXX looks a lot like XXX which means XXX which is exactly what the location is."

 

[necoli]

I studied latin for five years.... Do yourself a favor, and not bother with it. It is certainly not useless, but there are certainly much more productive things you could be doing with your time.

 

[Tin Man]

Latin can be very useful. For my undergrad degree I had to take two introductory level courses and then attempt to test at the 300 level. Since no one speaks latin, the courses were focused on reading. Now I knew several languages were derived from Latin, but still it surprised me when I was exposed to several languages and I could read a good chunk of the words! One of the apps on my ipod is a brain atlas and I was going through that and seeing some of the words and I was able to say "Oh that makes sense since XXX looks a lot like XXX which means XXX which is exactly what the location is."

I studied Spanish and got the same effect, since Spanish is pretty similar to Italian, fairly similar to Italian, and in some ways, even similar to German.

No point in studying the root language if you can get the same effect using a language that a good chunk of patients will actually speak.

As for actual medical stuff, no. Even if you know where some anatomical term came from, it's not going to make things less of a memorizing game. The ONLY place where it MIGHT help you is when studying biology of organisms and memorizing a bunch of different genus names, which maybe you can associate with something you know and therefore have an easier time memorizing. Maybe.

But I still doubt it's going to be worth dedicating any degree of study toward.

If you like Latin, study Latin. If you're looking for a useful language, study Spanish. Or, even better yet, since everyone is studying Spanish, and therefore it will be unlikely that as a physician another doctor or nurse cannot translate Spanish for you, study another language that few people in the US know. For instance, I took Russian, not only because it has a fairly easy grammar structure, but also because there are few people in the medical field capable of translating Russian, and I know from experience that there are some people, especially on the east coast, who speak nothing but Russian.

 

[mmmcdowe]

I studied latin for five years.... Do yourself a favor, and not bother with it. It is certainly not useless, but there are certainly much more productive things you could be doing with your time.

That being said, I wish I spoke latin, but mostly because of interest in medical history. Going back, I might have taken latin instead of spanish, but ultimately spanish was probably the better choice.

 

[OrangeTree]

Knowing medical terminology is useful for medical school. Latin and Greek words mainly make up medical terminology. You might want to take a course called "Medical Terminology." It's very useful.

 

[DrYoda]

I remember hearing in HS and undergrad how people in healthcare would find Latin useful. Now that I'm in med school I've realized this is a lie.

Clinically speaking, Spanish is by far the most useful. Other languages can be useful in specific regions (Arabic in Detroit, Russian in Brooklyn, ect).

 

[LizzyM]

Latin is useful for vocabulary and not just medical vocabulary (or so I have been told). That said, I chose Spanish and found the same result in terms of vocabulary and it has the side benefit of being spoken by the majority of non-English speaking people in the US.

 

[Instatewaiter]

One of my friends majored in Greek and Latin. With the exception of anatomy she felt it didn't help much in med school.

Spanish is much more useful.

 

[dw2158]

i took 8 years of latin. don't take it for the MCAT-- that's ridiculous. it might be helpful for med school, but i don't think so... LizzyM made a comment about vocabulary and i disagree. being a voracious reader has helped by vocab waaaaay more than 8 years of latin study ever could. latin helped me more with understanding how language is structured, not the meaning of words.

i'm also proficient in spanish. that, as others have said, has proven to be way more useful, especially since i live and work in NYC.

but i loved latin and it made me happy through middle/high school and college. so i guess it was useful in that sense.

 

[LizzyM]

i took 8 years of latin. don't take it for the MCAT-- that's ridiculous. it might be helpful for med school, but i don't think so... LizzyM made a comment about vocabulary and i disagree. being a voracious reader has helped by vocab waaaaay more than 8 years of latin study ever could. latin helped me more with understanding how language is structured, not the meaning of words.

i'm also proficient in spanish. that, as others have said, has proven to be way more useful, especially since i live and work in NYC.

but i loved latin and it made me happy through middle/high school and college. so i guess it was useful in that sense.

I think a year of Latin is helpful for vocab -- more than that and you have diminishing returns and the feeling that it isn't helpful.

 

[Law2Doc]

I was just wondering how helpful it is to take a Latin class in terms of aid on the MCAT and in med school. any feedback would be really helpful!

Useless for the MCAT. May help you remember a few terms in Anatomy, but not enough to justify taking a course. If you need to take a foreign language spanish is much higher yield. Actually any foreign language that people actually speak in the present day would be higher yield. Heck, even Klingon would be higher yield (far more people speak it these days), particularly when certain conventions are in town.

 

[kavorca]

Se habla espanol.
Yak tuk varrrggg, Klingon.

 

[fizzgig]

Latin is a dead dead language, as dead as it can be.
It killed the mighty Romans, and now it's killing me.

Really though having taken a year in jr high was helpful in some terminology (guessing what a word relates to) and spelling. At an older age I don't know how helpful it would be. If it just interests you academically then the 'medical terminology' study sheets you can find might be of interest but being able to conjugate thisnthat verb is not going to help you.

 

[lstone13]

I think if you have the option, go for a Medical Terminology class before you choose to take Latin. And then, if you have to take a foreign language, go with Spanish or something else.

 

[SweetRain]

Take medical terminology. It covers all the latin you'll need to know in terms of studying medicine.
English is my second language so I didn't know a lot of medical/scientific terms when I first came to college. But med term course will teach you most of the pre/suffix such as -itis, hepa-, etc which was very helpful for me.

 

[dw2158]

I think a year of Latin is helpful for vocab -- more than that and you have diminishing returns and the feeling that it isn't helpful.

have you taken a latin class? if so, maybe yours was structured differently than the latin 1 class i took, or any of the several latin 1 classes i've tutored for. and in that case, advise away! but in the latin 1 classes i'm familiar with, you learn the very basic stuff. there's the occasional"oh, that's where that word comes from!" realization, but nothing earth-shattering that would help you learn new words or anything. most of the time is spent learning how to decline nouns and conjugate verbs.

 

[cbear]

have you taken a latin class? if so, maybe yours was structured differently than the latin 1 class i took, or any of the several latin 1 classes i've tutored for. and in that case, advise away! but in the latin 1 classes i'm familiar with, you learn the very basic stuff. there's the occasional"oh, that's where that word comes from!" realization, but nothing earth-shattering that would help you learn new words or anything. most of the time is spent learning how to decline nouns and conjugate verbs.

Yeah, I studied Latin 3 years and Spanish/French/Arabic/Mandarin would all probably be more useful to a doctor...but Latin is so darn fun! I mean, you get to De Bello Gallico and it's like, whoa, Caesar done kicked some Gaul a**. There are dead Nervii all over the place. Crazy stuff, man. And yeah, I spose it helps a bit with vocab. You get to drop words like pulchritudinous in papers.

 

[dw2158]

Yeah, I studied Latin 3 years and Spanish/French/Arabic/Mandarin would all probably be more useful to a doctor...but Latin is so darn fun! I mean, you get to De Bello Gallico and it's like, whoa, Caesar done kicked some Gaul a**. There are dead Nervii all over the place. Crazy stuff, man. And yeah, I spose it helps a bit with vocab. You get to drop words like pulchritudinous in papers.

yeah, i love latin. but knowing spanish has been so much more helpful in life.

 

[ArkansasRanger]

you'd know e. pluribus unum without having to look it up all the time

i don't know why i can't ever remember that

 

[vitaebellaa]

I'm taking elementary latin next semester to fulfill my language requirement. While it would be nice for latin to prove useful in medical school, I am also hoping that it will help me as a science major (nsci). Though I hope it will help with terminology, I am mostly looking for it to help me comprehend/make associations with vocabulary a little better in general.

Also, foreign languages have been my weak spot throughout my life as a student. Granted, I never had the strongest foreign language program in hs (watched movies 90% of the time, 10% of the time studying strictly for state assessments). I am absolutely terrible at oral assessments (don't take that out of context ) so its definitely a plus that latin is dead.

 

[chrisski]

I'm taking elementary latin next semester to fulfill my language requirement. While it would be nice for latin to prove useful in medical school, I am also hoping that it will help me as a science major (nsci). Though I hope it will help with terminology, I am mostly looking for it to help me comprehend/make associations with vocabulary a little better in general.

Also, foreign languages have been my weak spot throughout my life as a student. Granted, I never had the strongest foreign language program in hs (watched movies 90% of the time, 10% of the time studying strictly for state assessments). I am absolutely terrible at oral assessments (don't take that out of context ) so its definitely a plus that latin is dead.

I believe that Latin will stand out on an application more so than common languages(i.e spanish). Plus, if you have any interest in roman history it is fun. If you have any interest in ancient Greek, Latin is also a great bridge into it. Very few students take ancient Greek, and those that do are highly respected. (Although I am a classics major, thus am obviously biased, so take what I say with a grain of salt). Plus, more medical terms come from Greek than Latin. However, I would not recommend taking Latin just for science/medicine. If that is your goal just take a medical etymology course. If you want more, learn Italian. Italian is an easy language with a similar vocabulary to latin. However, the grammar of Italian is very easy. Latin grammar is obviously quite difficult and if your sole interest is to build your vocab I would imagine that the grammar would become quite tedious. Hope this helps. (if anyone has any questions on Italian, Latin, or Greek just hit me up)

 

[necoli]

If you want to increase your vocabulary, why not just read a dictionary for a year?

way to stick with it dw... 8 years is a lot of latin.

I agree with the previous posters in that spanish would be a good alternative to latin. It may be something you will actually use outside of medicine!

 

[dw2158]

If you want to increase your vocabulary, why not just read a dictionary for a year?

way to stick with it dw... 8 years is a lot of latin.

I agree with the previous posters in that spanish would be a good alternative to latin. It may be something you will actually use outside of medicine!

it is... but i'm very open about the fact that it wasn't terribly useful, just a lot of fun.

 

[chman]

I always wonder about this in my science classes. It seems that knowing what all the terms mean could be helpful for memorization and concepts. But as far as speaking it, I doubt one would get the chance much outside of an academic setting.

 

[chrisski]

I always wonder about this in my science classes. It seems that knowing what all the terms mean could be helpful for memorization and concepts. But as far as speaking it, I doubt one would get the chance much outside of an academic setting.

I am only trying to be informative, so I apologize if this comes off differently......You actually don't speak Latin in a Latin class (or anywhere outside the Vatican), at least not conversationally. A Latin class is different than most languages in that the professors and students primarly intereact in English.

 

[chman]

I am only trying to be informative, so I apologize if this comes off differently......You actually don't speak Latin in a Latin class (or anywhere outside the Vatican), at least not conversationally. A Latin class is different than most languages in that the professors and students primarly intereact in English.

Weird. Well, I watched an intro class online and it was all in Latin. Must have been atypical.

 

[chrisski]

Weird. Well, I watched an intro class online and it was all in Latin. Must have been atypical.

I am interested to see a link. Its possible if it were some upper level course, but I can't imagine this was the case for the lower levels. Perhaps I am wrong, my opinion is purely based off of how they do it at my school.

 

[chman]

I am interested to see a link. Its possible if it were some upper level course, but I can't imagine this was the case for the lower levels. Perhaps I am wrong, my opinion is purely based off of how they do it at my school.

I am having trouble putting it on here, but here's the link. It's on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evF9TPyHkUg&feature=related

There is more English than I remember. But whatever. I probably just turned him off without giving him much of a chance after listening to the first part. I don't really understand what you meant though..I mean, I have taken a year of college Spanish, and in order to learn a language you have to speak it. So how do you guys learn it without speaking it?

 

[dw2158]

I am having trouble putting it on here, but here's the link. It's on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evF9TPyHkUg&feature=related

There is more English than I remember. But whatever. I probably just turned him off without giving him much of a chance after listening to the first part. I don't really understand what you meant though..I mean, I have taken a year of college Spanish, and in order to learn a language you have to speak it. So how do you guys learn it without speaking it?

you read. in middle and high school we had a textbook (ecce romani, anyone? ) where each "chapter" was a story about this family that we all got to know and love and you learned new vocab and harder grammar with each story. homework was to translate it and we went over it in class. same deal with translation/review in late high school and college-- only it was real stuff we were reading. i've read ovid, virgil, catullus, cicero, livy, horace, caesar, tacitus... i could go on but you get the idea. translation is no small task in latin because (1) the good authors had some mad weird sentence structure and used all sorts of literary devices and (2) in latin, the words in sentences do not necessarily appear in an order remotely close to how you'd say the sentence in english.

 

[akinetopsia]

Yeah I took Latin from 8th grade to 12th grade, finishing up with AP Latin. For me, it has made learning other languages a bit easier. It does help with vocabulary a little bit and if you ever run into a new word that has a Latin root you know, you can kind of get the gist of it from the context in which it's used.

IMO though, there are far more Greek-derived words and roots used in medical terminology than Latin. Take Greek, go vacation somewhere in the Aegean.

Μαθαίνουν την ελληνική γλώσσα

 

[fizzgig]

you read. in middle and high school we had a textbook (ecce romani, anyone? ) where each "chapter" was a story about this family that we all got to know and love and you learned new vocab and harder grammar with each story. ...

ha, we used a textbook that had a similar setup.. dunno if it was the same one... all i remember (hello 6th grade and the important things we retain from it) is that we all thought it was way more hilarious than it really was that Melissa "pleased" Grumio, which displeased Metella, the lady of the household

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metella
apparently i'm not the only one that remembers being amused by the use of the word "please"

 

[dw2158]

ha, we used a textbook that had a similar setup.. dunno if it was the same one... all i remember (hello 6th grade and the important things we retain from it) is that we all thought it was way more hilarious than it really was that Melissa "pleased" Grumio, which displeased Metella, the lady of the household

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metella
apparently i'm not the only one that remembers being amused by the use of the word "please"

i know that book because i've tutored people who used it, but that's not the one i used. the first chapter of ours started "ecce! in pictura est puella nomine cornelia. cornelia est puella romana quae in italia habitat"

yeah, we had to memorize the first chapter. i could do the rest but i think i've lost enough respect for today.

 

[ChimeraAlly]

I think the knowledge isn't needed ... I had latin for 2 years at high school, we read some non-medical articles and such stuff ... we didn't actually do the conversation since it's a dead language.
But it's really useless ... you'll learn all latin words you'll need in med school. I forgot everything else very soon.

 

[sassilysweet]

I have to say, I took 3 semesters of Latin in college and one of ancient Greek and I loved them all.
Latin helps a little for vocab, but it REALLY helps for correct sentence structure when writing papers. I learned SO much grammar from those classes. I think the words are a little harder to retain, though, because as everyone has mentioned you don't speak them you mainly just read.

If you enjoy langauges and want to become a better writer, take Latin.
If you want to learn a language you will USE, take Spanish or Somali (depending on your region)
If you want something that will help in medical school, take Medical Terminology.

My $.02

 

[nwilkes]

Etiam in pictura est villa rustica ubi Cornelia aestate habitat...

*Sigh* Latin is just plain fun.

 

[dw2158]

sassilysweet, that was totally on-the-nose. i agree.

Etiam in pictura est villa rustica ubi Cornelia aestate habitat...

*Sigh* Latin is just plain fun.

i loved ecce romani!

 

[kavorca]

Semper ubi sub ubi
-Wheelock

 

[fizzgig]

i gotta get out of this thread but this definitely needed to be posted... i mean, there ARE valid reasons to take latin, and clearly self protection is one of them...

(you'll need to move to 3:15 for the latin bit, which picks back up after the french/german again...)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQggmX_c6GU&feature=related

ps dw2158, i love your alot

 

[mediterranean]

Just thought I might say that if you have a good anatomy teacher, he/she will tell the Latin and Greek origins of the parts that look like that origin. (e.g. cauda equina is the spinal nerves below the spinal cord that look like a horse's tail which is what the latin terms mean). I can't tell you how much this helped me in studying but this could be because I took 3 years of Latin in high school so my mind works with association.

You can kill two birds with one stone with a teacher like that. But I agree with learning a different language because the U.S. grows in multiple ethnicities each year. The more unique the language, the better niche you build yourself if make it to your own practice after med school

 

[chrisski]

i gotta get out of this thread but this definitely needed to be posted... i mean, there ARE valid reasons to take latin, and clearly self protection is one of them...

(you'll need to move to 3:15 for the latin bit, which picks back up after the french/german again...)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQggmX_c6GU&feature=related

ps dw2158, i love your alot

lol

 

[rama kandra]

Kavorca thats not a seinfeld reference, IS IT?!

 

[JFK90787]

Took Latin for 5 years (7-11 grade). It's useless, felt like my high school version of ochem

 

[akinetopsia]

Whoever was talking about Grumio - pretty sure that's the Cambridge Latin series. Caecilius Iucundus, Metella, their son Quintus, and the slaves Grumio and Clemens. Those were the books I used too, lol

 

[FutureCTDoc]

Whoever was talking about Grumio - pretty sure that's the Cambridge Latin series. Caecilius Iucundus, Metella, their son Quintus, and the slaves Grumio and Clemens. Those were the books I used too, lol

I remember that series very well. Unfortunately down here in Miami it is comparatively useless as compared to French patois (especially crayol aysien) and Spanish.

 

[long]

I took Latin and Greek for 4 years in college and I think my Greek 101 teacher put forth the best reason for learning it: "so that you can be snooty, and look down upon your fellow man."

 

[chrisski]

I took Latin and Greek for 4 years in college and I think my Greek 101 teacher put forth the best reason for learning it: "so that you can be snooty, and look down upon your fellow man."

. But at the same time so true

 

[Iapyx]

Latin is nice because you are not graded on your speaking ability, so if you are looking to fill a requirement I recommend taking it.