[toyg]

Hardest part was memorizing all those declinations and verb forms. Which is not unlike what you have to do in Italian, but we start doing that 10 years earlier than we encounter Latin. And the second-hardest part is that learning a dead language when you’re 14 and your hormones are in full swing, tends to fall down the list of one’s priorities. One of my teachers tried to keep us interested by focusing on erotic poetry...

This said, I agree that for us a bunch of things are probably easier, simply because a lot of terms map directly to modern words, so the vocabulary is fairly easy to build. We also tend to ignore any pronunciation rule - we just pronounce it phonetically using Italian rules. I understand “real” scholars actually follow different rules, and Anglo people have their own conventions. Also, there is a lot of Latin all around us in inscriptions and names etc, so if it “clicks” you can find a lot of inspiration and practice with no effort.