[akshayshah]

Second-year high school students do read actual Roman texts, but they typically do so very slowly and laboriously - a day’s homework might be translating a single paragraph.

I studied Latin from 7th grade through my early undergraduate years (1990s to early 00s), and that dynamic didn’t change as much as you might expect - the focus remains on deeply reading a few texts, rather than building the fluency required to quickly read and understand new texts on unfamiliar subjects. The corpus of texts for standardized exams is also relatively small and well-known - I didn’t see a single unfamiliar passage on either AP Latin exam.

Perhaps some classics professors read Latin as fluently as the average Spanish literature professor reads a Madrid newspaper, but I certainly never met any outside Reginaldus’s orbit.

[Symbiote]

The Latin teacher at my school and my French teacher would discuss private matters in Latin, confident that us 13 year olds wouldn't understand.

I've no proof, but my assumption is there are students of Latin casually speaking the language to show off at places like Cambridge University.

[BitwiseFool]

Did the Latin students have a rivalry with the goth kids and the vandals?

[ptsneves]

So good!

[mmooss]

How could you not gain that fluency after years? Every human naturally learns languages; you don't need a Ph.D. at all.

[dkarl]

I think it's because it's "classics." Your first couple of years excepted, everyone hears about a text years before they read it. By the time they read it, they already know a lot about it, and they read it closely and systematically to get a deep understanding of it.

There isn't a firehose of new text being created in Latin, and you never (or very rarely) scan over something to find out what it's about, extract a quick fact from it, or decide if it's worth reading. You know what's in it, you know the standard take-away from it, there's a good chance you've read the highlights in translation already, you may even know one or two hair-splitting academic controversies about it, and you are sitting down for a good hour or several hours with it. It's a completely different kind of reading from scanning a web site or a newspaper to find something worth reading more closely, looking for the answer to a concrete question, or scanning something to decide if you can afford to not really read it.

[akshayshah]

It’s certainly possible to gain that fluency, as Reginaldus demonstrated. But it seemed to me that fluency reading unfamiliar texts simply wasn't the goal of my Latin education; instead, we were studying to know Catullus, Ovid, Horace, Cicero, and Vergil, with a small smattering of other Roman authors. It was an education in classics, not the Latin language. We just weren’t asked to extract information from large volumes of text, speak extemporaneously, or comprehend casual conversation.

The best analogy I can give is this: imagine taking Spanish from grades 7-12, culminating in a full year reading and understanding selections of Don Quixote. The entire curriculum builds towards this capstone year, and other areas of inquiry get very short shrift. Nobody cares if you can live comfortably in a Spanish-speaking country or watch Spanish-language TV. Nobody cares about modern idiom, or any more recent works of literature, or technical writing. s/Don Quixote/Aeneid + a small corpus of Roman poems/g and you have the bulk of my Latin education.

This sounds negative - we weren’t fluent in Latin! But for a teenager, it was a wonderfully deep exploration of Rome’s greatest hits. I loved it.

[pinkmuffinere]

>Foster was basically the rallying point for people opposed to the grammarian methods of teaching languages that started in Classics but ended up taking over how foreign language is taught in most schools and contexts

Humans naturally learn languages when they are immersed in the language. It sounds like Latin instruction was more focused on rules, and didn't provide that immersion before Foster. I can attest that many other foreign language classes also don't provide enough immersion to really learn the language, although being limited to ~10 hours a week makes that virtually impossible.

[mmooss]

Ph.D.'s are rather immersed. Imagine how much time you spend staring at Latin texts over many years.

[tannhaeuser]

It's because you only ever translate but never speak or synthesize latin exept in a few church circles where it is or was used as Lingua Franca (such as depicted in Conclave last year). I understand the original post to be about the profound difference this makes in acquiring a language intuitively.

[umanwizard]

I'm skeptical how much speaking/synthesizing the language matters if you only care about reading.

I can read German moderately well (can get through newspaper articles pretty easily, and novels with some effort), but I have very little ability to synthesize it (it'd take me quite a lot of effort to construct a sentence in writing, and I can't really speak at all). But the lack of ability to produce the language doesn't seem to negatively impact my reading ability.

[jhbadger]

And this is the case for most scholars of ancient languages besides Latin and Ancient Greek. While those two big ones get the occasional translation of a modern work like Harry Potter or The Hobbit, nobody is writing new works in Sumerian or Middle Egyptian, although reading existing works is what these scholars do.

[nkrisc]

> Every human naturally learns languages

... in the first few years of life. Beyond that, it's an intentional, conscious and often challenging effort for many.

Some people, even as adults, are far more adept at learning new languages than others. For the rest of us, it typically requires devotion to the subject for years.

[adrianN]

Small children are devoted for years to learn the language. Being unable to communicate your basic needs is a strong motivator.

[nkrisc]

Yes, though what I meant (though neglected to specify) was devoted, conscious study. Young children do not learn language the way adults typically do.