I am a bit confused. Accents in Greek are pitch accents, unlike the Latin stress accent. Latin requires no guide whatsoever – if the penultimate syllable is long, it is stressed. If it is short, the antepenult is stressed. I have never met a single student who has had a problem with this, even if they did not learn Latin with macrons.
We all learn that Greek accents were originally pitch accents but nobody-not-obody actually pronounces them that way. In fact, I think we know they weren’t pitch accents by the Hellensitic period, and they’re certainly not today. You are right, however, that Greek accentuation is sometimes arbitrary. It is, however, marked on the word itself–unlike Latin. So prose comp is harder, but reading is never hard.
As for Latin vowel length, it’s not generally marked, although some early textbooks do it. Most students ignore it, but it’s exceedingly rare for a student to read a passage and not get many of the longs and shorts wrong, which inevitably involves getting some accents wrong too.
This is why Greek is more difficult. The morphology is objectively more complex, requiring more memorization. Latin requires only four principal parts for verbs; Greek requires six. While totally irregular verbs occur in Latin (fero, sum, volo), many more occur in Greek, and there are more verbs with unconnected principal parts.
It varies across the language. Greek has two extra principle parts, Latin has an extra case. I’m not sure about the number of irregular verbs. My brain has trunks full of them in both languages. I think a lot of these differences go away if you focus on the Vulgate versus the Greek Bible. Greek tends to come off harder because knowing it means reading a much wider dialectical and historical range. Homer isn’t the Lesbian Greek of Sappho and neither are Byzantine Greek. Latin’s more constricted.
I would concede, however, that Greek vocabulary is harder than Latin for an English speaker. Now and then you get something that you know from medicine or science, but mostly, as Steve Martin said, “Those French have a different word FOR EVERYTHING!”
Lastly, if anyone is choosing between them—and both is not an option—I’d recommend the Greek. From a Christian perspective, there’s a lot more good stuff in Greek than Latin, notwithstanding a few important Latin authors. And the same goes for non-Christian literature. Latin literature started late and almost all the good stuff was written within a period of maybe 200 years. It’s a teacup. Geek literature is an ocean.
Seems to be some kind of unnecessary mental block there.
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