Choosing a Language to Study for Reading: Latin, Greek, French, German and Beyond

There is no scoreboard that tells you which language will make you smartest, and pretending there is one wastes years. A better question is plainer: which books do you want to read in the original, and will you care enough about them to keep going for hundreds of hours? This page gives a way to answer that, with a table, some cautions, and a few habits that make the work last.

Why numeric rankings do not hold up

You will sometimes see lists that score languages out of 100 for "intellectual return." Nobody has measured such a thing. The numbers are opinions in a precise costume, and the claim that difficult grammar trains a better mind is not established.

The best-known evidence concerns bilingualism and executive function (attention control, switching, working memory). A large meta-analysis of adult studies (Lehtonen et al., 2018) found that once publication bias was corrected, the apparent advantage was not supported. Paap and Greenberg (2013) reported similar failures to find it. Established as a description of those results. What this does not show is that language learning is pointless: it can give access to a tradition, to people, to different ways of phrasing a thought. It does mean "a harder language upgrades your intelligence" is Provisional at best, and no ranking among Latin, Greek, German and French follows from it. (Reading a study critically in this way is a skill in itself; see Reading Nutrition Evidence: What a Study Can and Cannot Show for the same habits applied to food science.)

Choose by the authors you want to read

The Foreign Service Institute categories describe how long English-speaking diplomats typically need to reach professional proficiency in speaking and reading a modern language. They do not measure reading an ancient language, and they are about time, not mental benefit. Treat them only as a rough guide to relative difficulty.

What each language realistically trains

Every serious language study trains attention to grammar and to the gap between a phrase and its translation. Latin and Greek, because they are inflected, make you notice how a sentence's relationships are marked rather than inferred from word order. German makes you hold a clause open until its verb arrives. French trains you in a compact, clear register of argument. These are plausible and widely reported by teachers and learners, but they are not experimentally demonstrated gains in general reasoning. Their solid, uncontroversial benefit is that you can read the text without a middleman. The Seven Liberal Arts, Hands-On: Logic, Proof and the Quadrivium explains why attention to grammar, logic and rhetoric belongs together.

Contrast languages

Arabic, Chinese, Sanskrit, Hebrew and Japanese are separate intellectual worlds, each with enormous literatures: Arabic for the transmission of Greek science and for Islamic philosophy and theology; Classical Chinese for Confucian and Daoist texts; Sanskrit for the Upanishads and Indian logic; Biblical Hebrew for the Hebrew Bible (a different project from Modern Hebrew); Japanese for a long literary and philosophical tradition. They are good choices if you are drawn to those texts. They generally require far more time for an English speaker: the FSI places Arabic, Mandarin and Japanese in its hardest category, with much longer estimated study times. They are poor choices as a shortcut to anything else. Provisional guidance, based on difficulty data and the texts involved.

Sustainable practice

• One language at a time. Several at once is a way of avoiding the hard part of any of them.
• Start with a text-based course such as Ørberg's Lingua Latina per se illustrata for Latin or Mastronarde's Introduction to Attic Greek, then move quickly to real passages.
• Translate a short passage into natural English, then revise it as English. This trains both skills at once, and connects directly to English Expression Mastery: Words, Sentences, Paragraphs and Speech.
• Set a small, steady time budget and a reading target, not a vocabulary score.

Etymology is history, not definition

Knowing that "philosophy" comes from Greek philosophia is interesting and often illuminating. But a word's origin does not fix its current meaning, and arguing "this word really means..." from its roots is called the etymological fallacy (see Carson, Exegetical Fallacies, and Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language, for classic discussions). Use roots to understand history; use present usage, checked in a good dictionary, to determine present meaning. Established as linguistic practice.

Translation improves your prose

Translating forces choices a reader of a translation never sees: literal or free, foreign flavour or natural idiom (see Venuti on the tension, and Bellos for an accessible tour). Each choice makes you ask what the author claimed and how English can state it exactly. The result is also a check on How to Read a Great Book: Levels, Modes and the Completion Standard: if you cannot say a passage in your own words, you may not understand it. For why tools like these matter, see Reasoning for What Ends? Wisdom, Character and the Examined Life. To place this page in context, begin at Mathematics: Start Here.

Try this

1. List five authors you would read in the original if you could. Mark the language of each. The language that appears most often, among authors you really care about, is your candidate.
2. Take a one-sentence passage from a translated work and write two English renderings, one literal and one idiomatic. Say which you prefer and why.
3. Look up a word you use often. Write down its etymology and its current meaning separately, and note whether they differ.

Further reading

• Minna Lehtonen et al., "Is Bilingualism Associated with Enhanced Executive Functioning in Adults?" (2018).
• Hans Ørberg, Lingua Latina per se illustrata: Familia Romana.
• Donald Mastronarde, Introduction to Attic Greek, 2nd ed.
• David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (2011).
• Lawrence Venuti, The Translator's Invisibility (1995).
• D. A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies, 2nd ed. (1996).