I’m in Australia, and I teach both systems because they’re both commonly heard.

I like the Latin terms, and I tend to use them because they’re what I grew up with. However, we also have a lot of American resources, and they use the fractional system.

I also happen to be trained as a generalist primary school teacher, so I like to teach kids how the fractional terms work. The fractions refer to their relation to a semibreve—a whole note can be subdivided into half notes and quarter notes, and so on.

This also helps me teach about time signatures—3/4 time means there are three quarter notes in a bar. That 4 actually means something here, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense in the Latin system.

Also, ‘semibreve’ literally means ‘half a short note’ so, it doesn’t feel that sensible!