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.