If you know German, Latin, or Greek it helps for understanding inflection in Sanskrit. Otherwise learning the eight cases of Sanskrit nouns is going to be really hard. I studied Sanskrit for a while many years ago in a Classic dept where I'd been studying Greek and Latin (alas, I can barely read Devanagari now), and it was mostly straightforward to understand the structures for the nouns and verbs - learning all the forms takes time and work and you need that to parse the syntax. But it's Sandhi that makes the language unusually hellish. If you've got a critical text or something with the works broken out, it's so not hard to read and get basics of syntax. But the originals of the classics the words are all compressed into long unbroken lines with subtle and difficult rules for joining words.