Latin or German GCSE.

[Bethan9]

My DS has the option to take either Latin or German GCSE in addition to his others, and he is struggling to decide which. Can anyone offer any advice? Is Latin still useful these days or would he be better off with German?

Latin is brilliant and really helps with English etc. However I wouldn't choose it instead of an MFL.

Is he doing another language?

He is already doing Spanish so he will have one MFL either way

Then I would go for Latin

German. Latin sucked the life out of my daughter’s GCSEs in terms of time consuming rote vocab learning. It’s also very hard to get high grades in it as you are effectively competing against the brightest private school children.

He's not at private school but he is pretty good at languages, he's hoping to do English lit at university if that makes a difference.

When I had the same choice at school, I did Latin, on the grounds it would be much easier to pick up German out of school, and I did end up doing German to AS-level at evening classes as an adult. (I'd have done A2, but not enough other people did to allow them to run a class.) However, evening classes are far harder to find these days, although there are online options etc that weren't available in my schooldays.

I have found Latin useful as a basis for other languages, including German. It's apparently also useful for thinking logically if you want to do computing. I do work I computing, but the majority of my colleagues have never done Latin. German was useful working in a German office and picking up a German boyfriend (though his English was fluent,)

So this probably isn't helpful...

Latin is more like solving a puzzle than learning a language but it is great for understanding the provenance of words, increasing vocabulary and learning other languages.

Whichever he enjoys more, which will partly depend on how well they are taught at his school.
I loved Latin at school and hated German, but later in life went to live there and loved learning it. But the Latin teachers at my school had been far better.
Either can be picked up later, there are lots of opportunities.

I found that Latin helped with the theory behind languages. It might help with his literature plans.

He would see lots of parallels between Latin and Spanish so that might be helpful. On the other hand I might pick German (which is a language I love) as the grammar is different to Spanish. Thoroughly jealous as a Head of MFL that his school can offer so many AND they have students who want to be dual linguists. Good luck!

I would choose whichever he prefers

i Did French, Spanish and Latin and the Latin was really useful.

It’s a dead language so many schools focus on translation from Latin into English, rather than teaching you to speak it, but as PP have said it’s really useful for understanding languages more broadly, as lots of modern words have roots in Latin - it’s great for helping with vocabulary in English too! (Also useful for names in sciences if anyone else’s DC are considering it)

It is harder to get top grades in it, so if having a clean sweep of 9’s is important, then I’d pick German, but if they’re ok with one grade possibly being lower, then for wider usefulness, I’d pick Latin every time.

I'm delighted to hear that Latin is still being taught at GCSE level.

My son did Latin (and Spanish), we revised together a lot. The exam board he did, the exam was all focused on translation from Latin to English. No speaking or writing test and no English to Latin translation.

there is a vocab list of words to learn, good online resources to do quizzes on the words and lots of logic in guessing the ones that he didn’t know. That word sounds like this word in English etc

he really enjoyed it, helped with his other language and he got a grade 9 in the exam with not much revision. I think it’s an unusual choice and he loved being in a very small class who were doing it while others did mainstream languages like French etc

Whichever one he enjoys the most.

German. did latin gcse, it was useful for exactly nothing. I did one of these degrees up to PhD, where latin is apparently super useful for, it isn’t.
if he wants to do history etc for uni it might be useful, for everything else -don’t

The problem is he's equally interested in both which is why he's struggling to decide, he may just have to toss a coin in the end!

What I mean is - the children taking it are generally the very brightest - mainly privately educated - and it makes it difficult to get the highest grades. If your ds loves the subject and is the brightest of the bright - then go for it - he’ll love it and still get a great grade.

They scrapped German at my daughter's school last year so it was only French and Latin on offer. Happily, she always wanted to do Latin. (Would have done German and Latin if she could). We have fun with the lists of vocab working out what English words have resulted from the Latin original (also assists in remembering them). She is also learning another language in her own time and doing really well - although I think it might be time to augment her Duo Lingo studies! Question really is- what would your son enjoy because that actually is the thing that matters. It makes learning so much easier.

I did both Latin and German. Got a B in both. I enjoyed the Latin way more, and got longer use out of it because a working knowledge of latin does chime in useful in various scientific contexts as well as helping to understand technical vocabulary in all sorts of fields. Plus I really enjoyed doing the Latin poetry. By comparison German was pretty dull. There was precisely one occasion where my knowledge of German was vaguely useful when I was doing postgrad research and there was a relevant paper in German. Although from a tourism point of view a "live" language is better than a "dead" one, I would far rather go to Italy than Germany anyway, and as I manage to get by with google translate in various othet countries where I don't speak the language, I don't think the German knowledge makes that much difference.

There’s not a limit on who gets what grades. If his work is worth an A he’ll get an A.

Maybe not a limit, but grade boundaries move each year to ensure everyone doesn't get a 9 (or whatever).
I don't know if it's true that only the brightest kids do Latin, but if you are up against a bright cohort, then you need to do better to get the top grades.

Seeing as he is already doing Spanish and wants to study English in the future I would go for Latin.

What exam board is it? 2 of my dc did Latin gcse; half of it is classics (so not language based, but Roman history, and Roman life / culture etc - which was quite easy to learn / revise). No translations from English to Latin, and no speaking exam. My dc got better grades in Latin than German. There is a brilliant vocab tester online (it is the WJEC vocab tester, it looks very old fashioned, but does the job brilliantly). I think there are approx 450 vocab words you need to learn for gcse; you can select which ones to do on the online vocab tester - you can pretty much do 50 words in approx 10 minutes. I used to do it as well, it’s quite fun! If you can get your dc doing this maybe 4-5 times a week (50 words a time, so 10 mins 4-5 times a week) for a year (? Or even better from the start of year 10, so that Latin lessons / homework become much easier) then that is a big part of the Latin revision done and dusted.

Aside from all these things, we thought that Latin gcse was quite a good one to do as it might be good on their CVs in the future - something a bit more unusual that would set them apart from the majority.

My dc had to do two languages at gcse, and had to do German (as it was the one they had studied from year 7), but frankly, German doesn’t seem that useful unless you want to live / work in Germany, or work in a role where you will need to speak with German people (or want to teach German I suppose)….