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Fluency in Latin

How does one go from a starting place, with little or no knowledge of Latin, to becoming fairly fluent in reading?

There are books and courses available for beginners - Cambridge Latin Course, Orberg's Lingua Latina to name the two I know of - but the question becomes what materials to use after that.

By fluent, I'd say you should be able to pick up Cicero, Suetonius, Virgil, Ovid etc. and read them without needing much time or effort - and be able to accurately translate mostly any of the passages if asked (i.e. when reading you need to get more than the gist). That I would call fluency. Perhaps there should be a higher standard set (I don't know which authors are regarded as more difficult than the ones I suggested).

With this in mind, any suggestions for the path to fluency in Latin?

Reply 1

clonedmemories

From my experience, I've always found poetry significantly easier to translate than prose - the common scansion, the way everything is broken down into smaller sentences (unlike Cicero, whose sentences can last up to 13 lines from what I've read!), just the whole format of it seems to make it easier and more manageable. The copies I used at GCSE/A Level were Bloomsbury editions (they all have a rather bright blue cover) and they come with a nice set of notes and a comprehensive vocabulary section, so I'd say those might well be a nice set to go for if you wanted to try some authors before prose. In particular, Ovid's Amores are fairly short in each one, so shouldn't be too much at a time to stomach!