Quote Originally Posted by kgcole View Post
I think part of my problem is trying to stick too closely to the English...which gives me the "word for word" habit of translating.
As I said earlier, you should learn some patterns which help you start thinking like Russian. It could be a good solution. Try it and I'm sure you'll see the result. You can't just translate words and put them together in the same order. It's nonsense.

For example, the problem with the verb "to have". "I have a car" sounds in Russian like "У меня есть машина". Do you see the verb "to have" here? Right, Russians don't use it a lot, it's not such an important verb in Russian as it's in English.
Also, there is no "а" (sort of "and", soft opposition) conjunction in English. There are only "и" (and) and "но" (but) in English. But the conjunction "a" adds an additional dimension to sentences, which you should figure out. Sometimes you can't say something properly if you don't use this powerful conjunction. It looks like Russians often avoid the words "either/neither", because there are no straight analogs of them in Russian. But can you imagine a good English language without these words?

And so on...