It has been said that one of the benefits of learning Latin is that it improves your understanding of English. Actually, one of the benefits of learning about any language is that it improves your understanding of English. That’s because when we learn other languages, we actually learn useful things presented in a standard format. For some strange reason, English teachers don’t talk about their subject the way all the other language teachers and linguists talk about the languages they study. To take a simple example, let’s talk about vowels. Because of the Great Vowel Shift in the late Middle Ages, English pronunciation doesn’t match English spelling very well. But English teachers ignore this and tell you stuff that just isn’t so. “Long A” is not a single vowel (a monophthong), for instance; it’s a diphthong, a combination of actual long E and a long or short I, depending on dialect. “Face” is actually pronounced FAY-ISS or FAY-EES. The same goes for “Long I,” a diphthong made up of A + actual long I. “High” is actually pronounced HA-EE. Actual long I is the second vowel in “machine.” Then there’s the fact that “Short A” is actually two different vowels – the actual A of “father” and the Anglo-Saxon æ (Ash) of “fat.” And so on. Other Germanic languages have strong and weak verbs. English has irregular and regular verbs. (BTW, the “irregular” verbs are in fact regularly formed, but this isn’t taught.) Most Indo-European languages have cases for nouns, such as the Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive. We call them Subjective, Objective, Possessive. We also have “determiners,” which is a bastardized part of speech invented since I went to school and which consists of various things grabbed from other parts of speech – articles, pronouns, adjectives. English teachers keep trying to make English make sense, but they keep making it more complicated. If you want English to make sense, then it needs to be taught like all other languages are taught. Since English teachers rarely do much to actually teach you about English (at least, successfully), the fact remains that the most helpful thing you can do to master English is to learn another language, ancient or modern. That will teach you about the sounds of the language, its history, its grammar and syntax, the meanings of its idioms. You will then be able to apply what you have learned to your own language's sounds, history, grammar, syntax, idioms. It’s the long way round, I know. But the official tour bus never seems to take you where you want to go.