Madison Berry

December 19, 2008 | 1:15 p.m. CST

Madison Berry, a junior at Columbia Independent School, said she likes how Latin connects to other romantic languages. "It’s fun to see a word, and if you don’t know exactly what it is, you can connect it to other languages like in English and Spanish and French and try to figure it out," Berry said. "I think that’s really cool."

Berry said she also has an interest in Latin because of the way it ties the past to the present.

"I think learning this base language will universalize what everyone knows," she said, "and it’s really interesting to know the history and translating things that happened hundreds of years ago, to see how it connects the past to now."