[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.