This was the part of my Russian study that I have been dreading for a long time.

I get what each of the cases do, nominative is the direct subject, accusative is the direct object, prepositional is obvious, etc. The thing that is stumping me is looking at a regular English sentence and trying to find out how to translate it into Russian because in school, I never really cared what an indirect object was and just went through the motions in English class, because, hey, I'm a native English speaker, when am I ever going to need to know how to diagram a sentence? I was dead wrong.

It just seems like there are so many cases that are in a normal sentence that I kind of get confused. I can look at a Russian sentence and kind of know what it means because the words don't change that much through the cases and I get the basic jist of it if I know the vocabulary that is used, but when it comes to translating something from my L1 language to Russian, I get messed up. Seems backwards.

Can anyone help me make it easier to separate a sentence's cases so it'll be easier to translate it into Russian? Or do I just need to go back to my 6th grade English class?

Also, are there any good ways to memorize the case endings other than repetition?