Hear hear! Exactly my point. Can knowing a second language be a benefit. Well if you like Spanish movies, then being fluent in Spanish will certainly increase you enjoyment. Nobody denies that.
Will it make you a better chess player? The simple answer appears to be: no.
It one my gripes with classical education. What benefit is there of learning Latin? Well, you can read Virgil in the original, and if that is your thing, power to you. Will it make you a better person? No, just no.
(Maybe, you'll have a slight, slight advantage when learning another Roman language. But surely, you would have been much better off to learn French to begin with, if that was the goal.)
I had to do 10 years of Latin; I hated it. I eventually scraped a bare pass on my second try at the exam.
I'm sure my knowledge of my mother-tongue, English, is much enhanced by having studied Latin. To the extent that cognition is verbal[0], knowing your own language better must improve cognition?
[0] I suspect the researchers' definition of cognition is carefully tuned to exclude verbal thinking.
If you speak a language that has been influenced by Latin, learning Latin is really useful for understanding our own language.
Additionally, because of the way that Latin is taught, you learn a lot of classical history and philosophy through the process, which - given the impact of Rome on the world - is useful across a wide range of disciplines.
Knowing well Latin makes it easier to learn new languages that inherit from it, both on the vocab side and the grammar side. French doesn't really have declinations, for instance. My wife studied it extensively during her studies, and she can pick new languages much quicker than me due to this.
Will it make you a better chess player? The simple answer appears to be: no.
It one my gripes with classical education. What benefit is there of learning Latin? Well, you can read Virgil in the original, and if that is your thing, power to you. Will it make you a better person? No, just no.
(Maybe, you'll have a slight, slight advantage when learning another Roman language. But surely, you would have been much better off to learn French to begin with, if that was the goal.)