CULTURAL CONNECTION
Latin was used in Europe for a long time and influenced a great number of European languages like English and Spanish. We call languages like this, “classical.” Similarly, classical Chinese was used throughout East Asia, including China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, for almost two millennia and had a major impact on modern Mandarin, Japanese and Korean.
Derivatives
We study Latin today because it can help us understand the Romance languages that come from it, as well as the individual words, or derivatives, that are borrowed from it. Knowing where a word comes from is incredibly useful when learning vocabulary because if you know a word’s original meaning, you might be able to guess pretty accurately what that word means today.