Frankly, I got over the curve by forcing myself to write a lot of it. I learned about the language back when I was a freshman in undergrad, and I intentionally

Frankly, I got over the curve by forcing myself to write a lot of it. I learned about the language back when I was a freshman in undergrad, and I intentionally just did everything in it. Not just my math and computer science work (but absolutely those), but also I tried to bend the language to do my other course work (e.g. there's a lot of ways to typeset beautiful linguistics diagrams and latin translations). I learned a lot when bending it. And then I again learned a lot when I began to have collaborators whose LaTeX I could look at. And one more time when I began to put together LaTeX for publishing. It was painful for about a week, uncomfortable for about a month, fine for about a year, great for the next five, and as fluid as speaking afterward. I'd call that the typical low-level tool learning trajectory.