Teaching children a foreign language

[Tarential]

While I am not an English major, I have read a lot of novels, textbooks and other various articles in English over the years. I don't believe I have ever encountered the three words you posted JPablo Considering the size of the English language and the niche usage / rarity of those words, I do not find it all that surprising.

On the other hand, I know all the main elements of the periodic table by their symbols (I tend to get fuzzy on some of the heavier and unstable elements) from usage in high school chemistry.

Simply put, it is a matter of knowing around a hundred elements (I forget the exact number) as opposed to knowing a very rare three words out of a possible... how many words? I've seen claims from 250 thousand to almost a million words in the English language (there are disputes as to exactly what constitutes a word). When a native speaker might speak around 30k at the high end for a normal university graduate it leaves a whole lot of missing words.

Consider, on the other hand, learning a mere 2-3k words of Latin. You are much more likely to learn the word for "gold" or "silver" or "fox" or other common terms in those few thousand words than you would be to stumble across "ferroelectric" (without being an engineer/physicist). At least, that is my very subjective opinion, using my own lack of knowledge of those three words as a judgment on their popularity of usage in English.

As far as learning the Spanish words and it being helpful as well, while I cannot judge of my own knowledge about specific terms I can say that I found Spanish to be, in general, much more closely related to Latin than was English. I would imagine it thus to help more than English, but less than actual Latin in deciphering the scientific terms which are based on usually Latin or sometimes Greek and rarely if ever Spanish (or English).

Please understand I say all this not to negate your posts. You are both quite correct. There are certainly other ways than learning Latin to associate the terms we are speaking of. Yet it seemed that some other people were not entirely sure that Latin was a good method to choose or was even useful in learning the terms, so I wanted to emphasize how Latin can be just as or more helpful than an increased vocabulary in English or learning Spanish.

[CrOtALiTo]

Originally Posted by Tarential

While I am not an English major, I have read a lot of novels, textbooks and other various articles in English over the years. I don't believe I have ever encountered the three words you posted JPablo Considering the size of the English language and the niche usage / rarity of those words, I do not find it all that surprising.

On the other hand, I know all the main elements of the periodic table by their symbols (I tend to get fuzzy on some of the heavier and unstable elements) from usage in high school chemistry.

Simply put, it is a matter of knowing around a hundred elements (I forget the exact number) as opposed to knowing a very rare three words out of a possible... how many words? I've seen claims from 250 thousand to almost a million words in the English language (there are disputes as to exactly what constitutes a word). When a native speaker might speak around 30k at the high end for a normal university graduate it leaves a whole lot of missing words.

Consider, on the other hand, learning a mere 2-3k words of Latin. You are much more likely to learn the word for "gold" or "silver" or "fox" or other common terms in those few thousand words than you would be to stumble across "ferroelectric" (without being an engineer/physicist). At least, that is my very subjective opinion, using my own lack of knowledge of those three words as a judgment on their popularity of usage in English.

As far as learning the Spanish words and it being helpful as well, while I cannot judge of my own knowledge about specific terms I can say that I found Spanish to be, in general, much more closely related to Latin than was English. I would imagine it thus to help more than English, but less than actual Latin in deciphering the scientific terms which are based on usually Latin or sometimes Greek and rarely if ever Spanish (or English).

Please understand I say all this not to negate your posts. You are both quite correct. There are certainly other ways than learning Latin to associate the terms we are speaking of. Yet it seemed that some other people were not entirely sure that Latin was a good method to choose or was even useful in learning the terms, so I wanted to emphasize how Latin can be just as or more helpful than an increased vocabulary in English or learning Spanish.

Certainly your own point of view is acceptable.
Although there're differences between the usages of the language, that even they aren't clear in the ambit scientific.

Yes you're right with the Latin, there're millions of words than doesn't seems in both languages.

[JPablo]

Originally Posted by Tarential

Consider, on the other hand, learning a mere 2-3k words of Latin. You are much more likely to learn the word for "gold" or "silver" or "fox" or other common terms in those few thousand words than you would be to stumble across "ferroelectric" (without being an engineer/physicist). At least, that is my very subjective opinion, using my own lack of knowledge of those three words as a judgment on their popularity of usage in English.

Totally understood, Tarential. I fully acknowledge your point. I agree my "English/Latin" examples are a bit extreme, and/or not so commonly used. Yet, just as an exercise, (not very careful at that, just roughly) I took one of your paragraphs above, and put in red the English words that have a Latin derivation. (In blue, from Greek through Latin.) (Note: ferro- and electric as units are actually a lot more common.)

But what? Not even a 20%?
Then again, many common English words are directly from Latin, which is why, knowing that "dead" language may be very useful for anyone who deals with communication and languages...

Again, I agree with your viewpoint on the matter, just wanted to further illustrate the influence Latin had in English... (much like current English has a heavy influence in Spanish... what with cyber-talk-texting and many other facets of life...)

[Jessica]

Originally Posted by irmamar

If you knew enough Spanish, you could associate those elements with Spanish:
Au - oro - áureo
Ag - plata - argento, Argentina
Fe - hierro - vía férrea, ferroso.
etc.

yeah but I associated them with Latin.