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Weirdly my mom said that Portuguese Portuguese is the closest language to Latin that she'd ever encountered, not French or Italian or Spanish. My high school required an ancient and modern language, so I did French and Latin, then dropped Latin and picked up Spanish because it's kind of wild not to know any Spanish in the US. When learning French it helped with roots, sure, but it really helped with knowing how subordinate clauses work, why you'd use the subjunctive, that kind of thing.