I'm using The New Penguin Russian Course, Living Language Beginners Russian, and Schaum's Russian Grammar.

I know all of the cases' functions and I can understand a Russian sentence if I recognize the words used. The problem comes about when I want to translate a longer sentence in English, to Russian, and there are so many cases, that even if I remember their endings, I still get confused because I forget which case goes with which word, etc.

I know what each case does, it's just the fact that in a long sentence, I have to take every word and change it... it's just too much and it totally messes me up. Not to mention, I don't have to do this too much in English (we only have like, two cases, and their the same most of the time and we don't have to match them up to gender, except for in pronouns like "he" "him" "she" "her"... so it's realllllyyyy easy).

It just seems like Russian has too much add-ons when it comes to grammar for me to deal with. I have to worry about gender, having all of the other words agree with that gender, if it's plural or not, and then I have to add cases to all of that. It's alot to deal with and I have no idea how to manage all of that. I always get the practice problems right in my books, it's when it comes to real life situations such as talking on the phone, or even typing this message, that seems a little crazy and a bit overboard.