Quote Originally Posted by Nichole. View Post
Does anyone have any ideas on how I could learn how to place these cases? (Excluding ways that would bore me to no extent...)
There are basically two methods to learn foreign language for an adult person.
1) Boring one. Few hours per day do some exercises, follow some course, read and speak. Normally theory will help you in this method, because theoretical rules anyway are much simpler than the language as it is.
2) Adventurous one. Come to the corresponding country, communicate much, and try to survive without using any language but local. Here you can avoid most formal rules etc. and get even better result than for the first method. If survived.

Few encouraging facts. 1)Russian is NOT the world most difficult language. (Many people say that Japanese is the most difficult.) 2) English and Russian are languages of the same family so they are much closer than many others. 3) Russian perfectly correct literary speech is not mastered even by many (most?) Russians, so perfection is not so necessary. 4)Normally in a private conversation Russians would not mind if you confuse few cases and would be pleased by the very fact of your speaking Russian (if your speech is intelligible of course).