The “Latin version” :
Pre : before
Requirere : to require

Great reaction !
Thanks (while I’m trying to hide somewhere under a stone) 🙂

pre·req·ui·site
adjective
1.
required beforehand: a prerequisite fund of knowledge.
noun
2.
something prerequisite: A visa is still a prerequisite for travel in many countries.

re·quire
verb (used with object)
1.
to have need of; need: He requires medical care.
2.
to call on authoritatively; order or enjoin to do something: to require an agent to account for money spent.
3.
to ask for authoritatively or imperatively; demand.
4.
to impose need or occasion for; make necessary or indispensable: The work required infinite patience.
5.
to call for or exact as obligatory; ordain: The law requires annual income-tax returns.

Khatz mentioned prerequisites. Prerequisite = required = necessary.

I apologize once again to anyone reading the comments and to Patrick. I simply Had to dictionary. I know have a problem and am seeking help. o3o

I’m stating that first learning another language, in this case Latin and Old Greek, as a step-up for other languages is not dumb by definition, as suggested in the OP.

If you don’t like learning those languages, please don’t.
If you do like them, please do … and hope for good teachers.
I did have really great teachers for both those languages. They were continuously crossreferencing the Latin and Old Greek words to other European languages and we learned a lot about the origin of our Western civilization in a very pleasant way.

By the way, one of the other things we learned during the reading of “the classics”, is to analyze the texts and try to find out what type of “tricks” the author was using to convey his or her message.
I find that one of the most usefull and important skills I ever learned in school.
It’s the best antidote against deceptive one-liners, like the one on top of this article 🙂

And besides the language part, you learn a lot about the origins of our western culture.
How is that for a nice bonus …

Knowing English is actually very useful for learning Japanese. It’s also possible to learn Japanese without knowing any English at all.

You neglected to mention the second part of that: it also greatly assists you in learning another language because it teaches you how to learn a language, that is by learning your first foreign language you learn how to learn a foreign language, you learn all your own personal little quirks, you learn how you need to be taught in order to learn. That’s a big one right there.

Cheers,
Andrew

To give a simple example :
Latin : fenestra
French : fenêtre
Dutch : venster
Spanish : ventana
German : fenster
Though the English word is “window” (derived from Old-Norse), the English word “defenestration” (to throw someone out of the window), contains the Latin words “de” (out of, away from) and “fenestra”.

Another example :
Old Greek : thura
English : door
Dutch : deur
German : Tür
Latin : postis
French : porte
Spanish : puerta
Dutch : portaal
English : portal
…

I compare it somewhat to learning Kanjis. Once you know their basic meaning, it’s much easier to learn actual words and you start to understand how Japanese words are formed with those Kanjis.
The same with Latin and Old Greek. Once I knew the basics, I started to see them popup in all European languages and a lot of times, I could derive the meaning of those foreign words, though I never learned them.
And since Japanese consists of about 11% loanwords, even there, knowledge of Latin and Old Greek can help.

Still gonna go there. But not for the classes to be the (only) way through which I learn Japanese but more so my school activities will be relevant to Japanese so I won’t have to feel bad for spending time learning that instead of .

My personal favorite so far is to try out a new technique. For example, I’ve been itching to try out MCDs for a long time but no projects seemed appropriate since it’s easier for me to learn everything (with a few exceptions such as RTK) through media alone, so I finally took up Ancient Greek (where media is nonexistent — unfortunately, people just weren’t making any podcasts or movies 2500 years ago), which is too fun to learn by itself, and made some MCDs from www.amazon.co.jp/CDエクスプレス-古典ギリシア語-荒木-英世/dp/4560005907/ for a start. It’s really nice to see how MCDs tremendously help to learn things in context where there’s virtually no context :3

She was like “You don’t really know how a language works on the inside until you learn another one. Basically, you don’t know how English works with all the patterns and such until you learn another language.”

I felt so many WTFs at that moment.

I swear, my German teacher spews some of the most hilarious garbage sometimes, and I feel bad for the people in my class falling for the trap that they think they will get good in 4 years of public education language learning.