Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul Thompson
Some of them are thinking in German and French, Nick  I think we should sympathise with their predicament, translating from English to German and the reverse poses problems of logic too, even though it is perhaps easier than the Latin!
I would vouch for the importance of all three field of knowledge that you mentioned. Nevertheless, "Classical education" in its late nineteenth century sense, with the sciences included, was in many ways superior to its modern equivalent. I imagine you don't object to Latin too much, if you still remember it
Warm regards,
Paul |
(a) IMO German has just as much unnecessary grammar as Latin (why on earth would anyone need genders for nouns — we manage without!) and I seem to remember that in Latin it doesn't matter what order you put the words in whereas German is rather picky about that.
(b) For me doing Latin was an almost complete waste of time but it was an Oxbridge entry requirement back then and that's what we were
supposed to aspire to. Not much call for it in researching WW2, so I never used it and can't remember much. Glad I did German, though!