Hey!
I'm a Classics major who specializes in Latin. It is incredibly demanding (so unless you want to dedicate hours every night to memorization I suggest French). It is also quite difficult. Over half the entire cohort dropped it after the first semester so I suppose that demonstrates a lot (there were only about 15 people in Latin 4 last year). It's usually reserved for those who want to major in Classics and from what I hear, there has been quite a lot of discussion about removing it from the intensive altogether since many students have complained about its difficulty. You have to be very passionate to put up with Latin but if you love it, then you won't mind the workload.
Hope this helps 
Strange post above. I did all the Latin subjects at Melb Uni as breadth, not sure what the poster above is talking about. There were lots of people doing it as breadth. Also, some of us found that it was quite a bit easier than Year 12 Latin: lots of spoon-feeding and giving you the answers (especially in unseens, where they tend to give you almost every word in 2nd year Latin subjects; moreover, the lecturer would always tell you which author would be on the unseen, unlike in Year 12 when it is completely random). Not sure why the poster above is saying that it involved 'hours of memorisation' every night; I get the sense that he/she is exaggerating the difficulty of the subject for some odd reason. In second year (the year of breadth I presume the main poster is thinking of doing) you didn't have to memorise much at all compared to year 12: all you had to learn was the translation, without having to memorise all of the extra points of poetic tropes, essay ideas, etc., and just like at school the lecturer Sonya Wurster goes through the translation slowly and clearly in tutorials. Sure, Latin is a little harder than the straight-out essay subjects, but the marking scheme is straightforward and it's not too hard to get a mark in the 90s if you put in a decent effort and respect the subject. The thing is most people are deluded if they think they can waltz into a subject, do no work, and get a top mark; you're gonna have to work for good marks at uni.
I just didn't like how the poster above tried to make it sound like Latin at Melb Uni is the most difficult subject in the world-it was quite disingenuous and unhelpful for the main poster who is genuinely interested in doing the subject and who might have preferred a genuine outline of how the subject. I'm also slightly confused about the above poster's comment 'I'm a classics major who specialises in Latin': when I was doing Latin the people actually majoring in Classics would 'specialise' in both languages (Latin, Greek, and usually to a lesser extent in something else too for a semester, like Syriac, Egyptian, Akkadian, Sanskrit) to the same very high level. Weird to do Classics and specialise in Latin: making things extremely difficult if you want to do Honours. Are you instead doing the Diploma or have they changed it so that, quite bizarrely, you can do Classics without being able to read both languages with equal high fluency (which is basically a waste of time, according to the Classics majors I met who did both and were brilliant at both, since you won't be able to read 'half' the evidence properly, and you have to be able to read Greek plays almost off-the-cuff in Honours)?
I can't comment on French since I haven't done it at Melb; but I have heard good things about it. You will find that there is certainly more memorisation in the French course, however, because as I've heard you usually have to learn words from reading every week in addition to writing mini assignments in French and/or oral presentations, so you're always actively looking at new words and having to use them whereas in Latin you're usually reading, finding new words, and just remembering them for next time you come across them in reading.
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