Because right now, it seems really easy. I’m not rubbing it in or anything, I’m genuinely curious about what’s so difficult about it. At this point the only thing I haven’t dabbled into is the Subjunctive (well, I did check out the Present Active) other than that, I think I’ve got most of the other grammatical concepts down well. It seems like Latin is an engineer’s language, everything so perfect and (usually) regular. I don’t know though, maybe I’m just naive. Besides the syntax of the literature, what’s so difficult about Latin?
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
?? I’m not sure I’m understanding you.
It was a(n admittedly snarky) response to your brushing aside the chief difficulty in reading Latin. Other than the syntax of the literature there’s indeed not that much difficult about Latin, but the syntax of the literature is what you’ll be wrestling with the whole of your Latin career after the introductory text.
I admire your enthusiasm.
Thank you! 
I know I kind of brushed it off, but I know that the syntax is really difficult. It wasn’t about downplaying the difficulty of the syntax as it was about seeing if there’s anything else that is difficult about Latin. Sorry about that.
More seriously, what gave me the most trouble at beginning Latin:
- everything about indirect discourse (learned throug experience)
- the gerund and gerundive (experience)
- distinguishing between the dative and ablative plural (context)
- the exact function of the ablative (most of its uses can be translated with “with”)
- the future participle (experience)
- the future perfect vs. perfect subjunctive (I still have trouble with this one)
- indirect questions (I think I’ve about licked it)
I had feared that it would be hard to distinguish the third-conjugation present subjunctive from the first- present indicative but (1) most Latin verbs are third-conjugation and (2) most first-conjugation verbs have English derivatives and are therefore easy to spot. (Plus context, of course)
Just keep doing what you’re doing. You’ll probably run into trouble but don’t let it get you down and especially don’t get stuck stopping and trying to force yourself to learn it for several days at a stretch: it probably won’t work and you’ll just lose momentum (and spirit). Just go on trusting that you’ll learn it from future reading and exercises.
With a few exceptions, as swtwentyman notes, learning the grammatical concepts is probably one of the easier parts. This is especially true if you’ve studied other languages before. Moving from a conceptual understanding of the grammar to actually reading continuous text is where the trouble lies. Historically, people would hit the wall when the finished their first year of Latin (which was mostly focused on learning/drilling grammar, such as conjugations and declensions) and then embarked on Caesar in their second year course. Of course, Caesar is considered one of the easier authors–the difficulty lies in having to deal with novel syntax, constructions, and vocabulary.
Otherwise, a big challenge is vocabulary. It’s easy to feel pretty sharp when you are working with the same handful of nouns/verbs/adjectives in every example. But reading can be a real drag when you have to look up every other word (and then forget them and look them up again later). Most of my memories of my first years of Latin involve me endlessly looking up words.
Getting the hang of poetry vs. prose is also a hurdle. I was starting to get used to simple prose when I started a class on Vergil. At the beginning I remember being totally confused on the syntax; even after having looked up all of the words/declensions/conjugations, I couldn’t figure out how everything went together.