I think that depends very much on what vocabulary you're trying to build.
Don't get me wrong, I liked doing Latin, but actually Russian has exactly the same gateway and vocabulary building functions for the large Slavonic group of languages and cultures as Latin does for the Romance group. There's a fair bet that your readings are going to start with Dostoievski and Solzhenitsyn because the vocab and grammar are fairly simple and the choice of study materials (in the UK at least -things may be different in the US) is very restricted so the connections to world history and classic literature are there.
Latin's big advantage in the UK is that the infrastructure to teach it is still there and it hasn't entirely disappeared from public life. Dumping Latin won't mean that thousands of shiny Russian and Mandarin teachers appear out of the ether overnight. If we're all going to go on being pig ignorant about so much of world history and literature anyway, it seems to me that at least a little Latin might help us realise that there is Stuff out there that we don't know and might want to know.
I do think that the only good arguments for studying anything are the ones swisstone puts forward. Perhaps it's more important to learn something, discover than you can learn and that you can enjoy it and want to learn more than to study a particular subject.
no subject
Don't get me wrong, I liked doing Latin, but actually Russian has exactly the same gateway and vocabulary building functions for the large Slavonic group of languages and cultures as Latin does for the Romance group. There's a fair bet that your readings are going to start with Dostoievski and Solzhenitsyn because the vocab and grammar are fairly simple and the choice of study materials (in the UK at least -things may be different in the US) is very restricted so the connections to world history and classic literature are there.
Latin's big advantage in the UK is that the infrastructure to teach it is still there and it hasn't entirely disappeared from public life. Dumping Latin won't mean that thousands of shiny Russian and Mandarin teachers appear out of the ether overnight. If we're all going to go on being pig ignorant about so much of world history and literature anyway, it seems to me that at least a little Latin might help us realise that there is Stuff out there that we don't know and might want to know.
I do think that the only good arguments for studying anything are the ones swisstone puts forward. Perhaps it's more important to learn something, discover than you can learn and that you can enjoy it and want to learn more than to study a particular subject.