I began with a short Latin grammar-exercise book, I forget which one. Then I worked my way through Wheelock, and after that the four volumes of Henle. This took me from one to two years. During this process I read a good deal of the Vulgate and a lot of Thomas Aquinas, and then I found some easy medieval texts such as the Gesta Romanorum, easy saints’ lives, etc, all of which served as “comprehensible input”. My primary scholastic interest shifted from Aquinas to Bonaventure and I ended up reading the bulk of his writings, many thousands of pages. During this time I also read a number of the Clarke-Hamilton Interlinear volumes and some other classical texts with commentary, as well as a good number of Loebs, using the translation extensively, but I never felt truly comfortable with classical texts compared to medieval and scholastic Latin. I tried some patristic Latin too, reading Latin-only versions of Augustine’s De Trinitate, Gregory’s Gospel Homilies, and the Sentences of Peter Lombard, but I found these quite difficult.
After several years of this I discovered the Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata series, and spent a lot of time and effort going carefully through the two main volumes twice, doing every exercise, and then all of the supplemental volumes at least once. In the course of this program my “fluency” skyrocketed and my ability to read any Latin text I picked up increased vastly. I had to read a truly vast amount of untranslated Latin text for my Ph.D., but most of it was fairly simple (the language, not the content!) and the lack of a safety net forced me to improve. For fun I also read a great number of novels, stories etc translated into Latin by moderns. Now classical and patristic texts, at least in subjects I’ve encountered before, are no serious problem and I fairly recently, for instance, read through all of Virgil and Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job in their critical editions without consulting a lexicon more than a handful of times.
tl;dr:
- Comprehensible Input
- Complete review of grammar at different stages of learning
- LOTS of casual reading rather than perfect, intensive reading
- Orberg