is conlanging supposed to be difficult? in my opinion generating words and deciding which words to include is hard, no matter how much i try, i always overthink. everything else is mostly easy (grammar is also difficult, but way less)
also i’m new to this forum, so i apologize if i’ve posted this in a wrong place.
Like all forms of art, conlanging is difficult. It takes a bit of linguistic knowledge and creative energy to make a conlang. There's many aspects to conlanging that take time to perfect, and you'll never get something you're happy with on the first try The important part is that you keep crafting and improving.
If you need any help, CFS is always open and willing! You can make threads in Workshop or Conlanging for any questions you have.
Languages are big things. There are many aspects to them. Simply learning one is usually a big undertaking.
It's like how jan Telakoman says in the intro to his comprehensible input series for learning toki pona: Even learning the easiest language with what he believes is the easiest method, he estimates it will still take about 15 hours of solid attention to get the hang of it.
My lang kot wawa was just a concept for about 15 years - it always felt like sitting down to focus on it was competition to my normal work that I couldn't afford to invest much in. What got me over the line was mainly struggling against English in the course of my paid work, and wanting more and more to see what a solution to the problems would look like. The second biggest thing was deciding to take vocab from toki pona. This saved me a lot of effort for vocab design.
Now that it's a functioning language, it's a lot more encouraging to work on it. As you progress in making a language, you gain more traction and it feels easier.
Now I'm using the grammar from kot wawa to make a new language (snvsdr dhv) where I experiment with word-building more, using generative morphology (roots + rules to generate a lot of words). In studying historical linguistics, (especially proto-Indo-European), I get the idea that natural languages might have also developed their vocabularies this way.
Generally, it's better to have something to fix than something that's completely right. If you're afraid to break a project by modifying it, you can always fork it.
I think it's usually a good idea to start off with a small set of words, test the mechanisms of your language design on that, and then add more. I used the Swadesh list as a guide before, but I was afraid it would Europeanise my language too much. But there are other lists you can use. There's frequency lists for various languages. There's toki pona, of course. The database Predilex may be useful. There's the natual semantic metalanguage (NSM) list.
I hope you manage to find a way forward. Try not to take everything on at once if you can.