Loosely based script:

So a little disclaimer: what I found easy and what I found difficult may differ depending on who you are.  

I guess we’ll start with the difficult and end on a positive note. What I found the most difficult was how Latin didn’t always translate easily into English. It forced me to think in different ways and really sit down and think about how English is word for word. We don’t decline nouns in English so that was quite new and challenging. There are 6 noun cases, but only 5 were commonly used so I just learned the 5. The ablative case was the most difficult for me because it’s the most difficult to translate. English lumps a lot of nouns together into one category, but Latin breaks them down quite a bit more. I tried learning the pronunciation at first since that’s what my textbook started with, but I decided it wasn’t worth the struggle. The memorization bit wasn’t difficult, but it was the process of memorization. Sitting down and studying these cases was a bit difficult, but once I learned them, I knew them pretty well. Since I already have a focusing problem, this Coronavirus chaos hasn’t helped at all and I had an even more difficult time sitting down to try and memorize them.

The easiest/most fun parts for me were the vocabulary and the verb conjugations. I just the learned present, imperfect, and perfect tenses. If I didn’t know Spanish, the verb conjugations would have also been quite the accomplishment. Since Spanish is a Romance language, a lot of the verb conjugations were similar with an e or an i added here and there.  The vocabulary was so fun because I got to see all the patterns and similarities Latin has with English despite English not being considered a Romance language.

This was a fun little challenge for me that at times was frustrating, but I came out the other end with more knowledge than I had before so I’d consider it mission accomplished.