For example, take a sentence like "this dog is bored". In order to determine the syntactical structure of this (simple) sentence, we need to know what parts of speech all the words are. "This" is what's called a determiner (not really important), "dog" is a noun, "is" is a verb, and "bored" is..... what?
Your first guess would probably be to say that's an adjective. If you say "The bored dog is over there", you're using it as an adjective modifying "dog". However, in the context of the original sentence, it's used as a noun. You can replace it with a noun, for example "This dog is a border collie". Syntactically speaking, "bored" is a noun in the example sentence. However, this doesn't go well with the common grade-school definition of a noun: a "person, place, or thing". "Bored" is an adjective, so how can it be a noun?
Our class spent a decent amount of time discussing thing, but I'm just trying to describe this confusion as best I can because it didn't confuse me at all; I have no problem accepting the idea of an adjective acting syntactically as a noun. For example, take these two Latin sentences:
puer sum
albus sum
The first means "I am a boy" and the second means "I am white", or "I am a white (man)", with the extra word understood. The first one is perfectly reasonable, because puer is a noun. In the second one, albus is an adjective, but is used as a noun. This happens all the time in Latin, so it didn't bother me at all. More part of speech confusion came up as we tried to actually define which words were prepositions, the difference between adjectives and adverbs, etc (interestingly, most linguistics treats adjectives and adverbs as equivalent, which takes some getting used to).
We also came across the concept of complete sentences being embedded in other sentences. For example, take the sentence "Mark thinks that Quincy is stupid". When you're making a syntactical tree to represent that sentence's structure, people noticed that "Quincy is stupid" works as a complete sentence on its own, which threw a lot of people off. When you're translating Latin, you have to be on red alert for that sort of thing, because subsentences often use very different grammar depending on how they're introduced. Swapping the two names for Latin ones, you would write the subsentence as Quintus stultus est, but the bigger sentence would be Marcus cogitat Quintum stultum esse. Notice that the forms for Quintus and the verb to be changed when they were embedded in the larger sentence. This is something called indirect statement in Latin, and it's used with a huge number of verbs to introduce auxiliary clauses, so it's a very common construction. Technically, Quintus (and the adjective for stupid modifying him) become the case used for the direct object, and the verb "is" becomes the infinitive "to be". If you wanted to translate it literally, it would be "Marcus thinks Quintus to be stupid", where Quintus is now the "direct object" of the verb "think" in some sense.
Anyway, that was a long-winded way of showing another example of some tricky aspect of English grammar that I'm used to from Latin. A few people were unfamiliar with the idea of a case system in a language; Latin uses 7. Latin has also forced me to think about the tense of a verb in more ways than I ever would in English: Present, Imperfect (past ongoing), Future, Perfect (past completed), Pluperfect (past before another past-tense verb), and Future Perfect (going to happen before some other future verb). English can express the same concepts, but it generally uses auxiliary words like "have", "had", "was", and so on instead of referring to the tense explicitly. Here are all the tenses in English for "I love":
Present: I love
Imperfect: I was loving
Future: I will love
Perfect: I loved
Pluperfect: I had loved
Future Perfect: I will have loved
See all those auxiliary words? How about Latin?
Present: amo
Imperfect: amabam
Future: amabo
Perfect: amavi
Pluperfect: amaveram
Future Perfect: amavero
By assigning a different ending to each tense, Latin forces you to think explicitly about what tense you're using, so when we encounter other languages in class that do the same thing, it's no big deal for me, but it can be tricky for someone who's been using English's more implicit tense system without thinking about it for their whole life.
I could go on and on, and I know there were better examples that aren't coming to mind. Part of this grammar understanding probably stems from the fact that I'm basically learning Latin over again in college (it's a long story), but I think even learning it once would have done wonders for my understanding of English grammar. I could barely have imagined when I first started studying Latin in 7th grade that it would help me in linguistics class 7 years later, but here we are; tempus fugit.
(PS: The title? It means "Latin is most useful")
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