I also think you're missing the point, but not in the sense that cletus talks about. Learning Latin rewires your brain, i.e. it opens your eye to certain modes

I also think you're missing the point, but not in the sense that cletus talks about. Learning Latin rewires your brain, i.e. it opens your eye to certain modes of communication and expression that you didn't know existed. I don't know Latin but learned Ancient Greek during my Linguistics MA, and was by how some Linguistics concepts are "implemented" in that language. My English monolingual classmates minds were blown by things like noun cases and the vocative. That is why you learn those languages (arguably Sanskrit, Chinese, Arabic, or any other language with a rich history also fits the bill). In this sense, learning Latin or Greek is similar to learning Lisp: sure you'll not use it in your daily life (I know, many will differ on that), but, boy, does it open your mind up. Unfortunately, these languages are taught by people who are generally English majors, not Linguistics or CS majors and so focus on the literature as opposed to cool grammar. The goal of my two semesters of Greek was just as a prelude to read Plato, so everything was jammed down your throat. I was surprised to learn that our TA, who was writing his PhD dissertation on Ancient Greek drama didn't know how to say "it's raining" or the name of the color green. Think of learning English just to read Shakespeare!