
If you study French, you get pretty quickly to a point where you process a French sentence in much the same way you process an English one: "J'ai lu tous les livres" comes across to you as "I've read all the books" and you don't think much about it.
In Latin, you can still be looking at a sentence six years later and doing what I call a "crossword puzzle" reading of it. You find a masculine noun in the ablative singular, then you go hunting around the sentence for an adjective to go with the noun, and if you find one you set those two words aside mentally and go back and look at the verbs.
In short, you're trying to read the sentence somewhat as one assembles a model airplane from a kit: looking at the directions and fitting the parts together and hoping it all makes sense.
(Extracted from Latin by the Dowling Method)