How "fluent" do professional classicists get in reading Latin and Greek? How do they do it?

Question

I've learned to an intermediate reading level Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and Classical Arabic. As a foreign language teacher, I'm well aware of current SLA research and the focus on communication and authentic, real-world applications. But these just don't come up, really, with languages that we have only in writing.

Right now, even after several years with these languages, I still have to use a dictionary and think explicitly about grammar when I read a "difficult" author like, say, Tacitus. By comparison, I can read without a dictionary and without explicitly thinking about grammar in Spanish or German, neither of which are my native language.

Which leads me to my question: How fluent is it possible to get (and how can we measure this properly) in reading-only languages like Latin and Greek? Do, and how do, graduate students and informal experts in the languages gain a fluency such that they do not have to use a dictionary very often and do not stop to puzzle out grammar explicitly?

Answer 1

Until fairly recently, pupils in elite schools in European countries began learning Latin and Greek at a very early age, and gained a high level of fluency before going on to university; this included the ability to translate into Latin and Greek (“composition”). At university a large portion of students enrolled for Classics, and a small number of these went on to become professors of Greek and Latin. By this stage they were very fluent indeed. Nowadays this is fairly rare, though I think that the current professors of Classics in places like Cambridge and Oxford still have this kind of background.