Studying Latin and Ancient Greek in high school unlocked so much knowledge and intuition for me: * Easy to grok how Romance languages work (French, Italian, et

Studying Latin and Ancient Greek in high school unlocked so much knowledge and intuition for me: * Easy to grok how Romance languages work (French, Italian, etc), you can make up a lot of vocabulary on the spot, knowing Latin, and still be right * Borrowed words from Latin in whatever language (English, German) are intelligible, you don't have to learn their meaning because it's a composite of something Latin * THis immediately affects your expression in writing as well as speech positively * Fantastic literature in original script readily accessible * Many good hours spent with improving the translations of especially tricky passages, analyzing sentences and grammatical structures had great overlap with how I approached thinking deeply about my other passions, Math and Astronomy so I got better at both groking and structuring information as well as patterns of thought when it comes to analyzing interesting problems. Honestly, at the end of high school I hadn't cared had I become a classical philologist if not for the earning prospects of that path. In contrast, how English was taught as a foreign language never came close. It was a totally uninspiring experience.