Admissions / Common Doubts / IV of XI

Is ninth or tenth grade too late to begin?

The short answer: No. A high school student learns grammar faster than a younger child, and our high school courses are built for exactly that.

Every autumn, a parent asks some version of this. Her son is in ninth or tenth grade, and his friends began Latin at eleven. Has he missed it?

The question imagines Latin as a language like French, where a child who starts young gains an accent and an ear that an older student never quite catches up with. Latin is different. Nobody needs a Roman accent. What Latin rewards is reading, and reading Latin rests on grammar, and a fifteen-year-old learns grammar far faster than a ten-year-old, because he can think in rules.

That is why our high school course, Grammar Latin, takes four terms, under a year, to cover what our youngest students take two years to absorb. A tenth or eleventh grader in a hurry can take Intensive Latin, all of the grammar in thirty classes, then the Summer Intensive in Latin Literature, and begin AP Latin the following fall.

The younger student is not wasting her time; she is learning by a slower and deeper route, suited to her age. The older student is not too late; he is taking the direct route, suited to his.

The longer essay: Nobody Needs a Roman Accent →

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