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Comment by tomclive | Hacker News Reader

Yep, I'll agree with this. I studied Latin for about 8 years at school and enjoyed it, even though at the time I had thought it pretty useless.

15 years later I moved to Spain for a while and was amazed at how naturally everything came together. Within a very short time, I was able to make sense of written Spanish.

Conversationally, not so much but I'm sure the Latin helped.

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Likewise, I have never learned Spanish, but when I saw a Zika-related public service advert on the NY subway when visiting the USA, I could read it easily. (Native English, plus Duolingo German and Esperanto which I estimate as A2 and A1 respectively)

> Zika-related public service advert on the NY subway

Virus is advertising itself as public service on the NY subway?!

Wow!

My Latin teacher often reminded us that ”Spanish is just lazy Latin“.

That's a common statement but somewhat inaccurate, as it omits the fact that what most of us think of as Spanish is Castillian, which has a heavy influence from Arabic languages.

Spanish native speaker here. The influence from Arabic is mostly in vocabulary, about 10% of our words have Arabic roots. However, Arabic had negligible influence in structure and grammar. Spanish is your standard Latin derived language.

As a fluent Spanish speaker, I won't go that far, but now that I am learning Latin, I am amazed how easy it seems. As an aside, I can understand ~80% of spoken Portuguese and maybe ~50% of Italian.

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