Everyone starts that way, but as you get more comfortable with/used to the words and grammar structures you’re using, the time to translate into the language you know best decreases. Eventually, it begins to happen instantaneously (i.e. you “see” the Japanese and the English at the same time). After that, the English portion fades away until it’s pretty much just understanding the Japanese straight up. It’s a gradual process, I think. But that’s just how I see it, others may be different.

If you are going to split up a sentence into 2 clauses using a comma, you can’t use ～ます form and the sentence ender よ. You have to use plain/dictionary form, or end it with a full stop. And you have to put でも before the comma, I think. Also, I think けど or しかし might be better than でも (though I’m not too sure on how exactly to use しかし). But then… wait, could you just tell us what it was you were trying to say? :P Sorry.

Practice.
Humans are amazing, they can learn to do
the most impressive feats. But this ability
is bound to certain downsides.
Like learning to Inline-Skate or playing the Drums
our brain needs to memorize complex patterns.
Before that almost every single step uses a lot of
“processing power” of our brain (Imagine someone standing
on skates the very first tme; they also move really awkward
and slowly, because every movement is new and needs
to be processed separately).
Once we turn something into a known and familiar pattern,
the amount of processing power needed is reduced
by a huge amount.

Same goes for any language. Before long you won’t
need to think of grammar points, vocab or forms.
It just starts to come naturally and you simply
“feel” if something sounds right or wrong.

Try to think of learning something new as millions
of bits of new information. Our brain can’t handle it
and we feel overwhelmed.
Humans are extremly adaptable, but we have to pay
the price for it.

• This reply was modified 13 years, 2 months ago by  Revenant.

I know from experience if you practice reading in your target language a lot, you’ll end up just being able to understand it without translating it to your first language. I know a few years ago when I was reading something in English I would translate it into Polish in my head, but now it’s no longer neccessary. The only downside to that is that I often know what a word means in English, but when asked to translate it into Polish I can’t for the love of God find a good word (today I was asked to translate the word “to defy”, but all I could come up with was a synonym in English, for example).

So just practice. A lot. I got better at English by watching anime with English subs, reading forums, playing video games… anything works, I guess.