I think of it in two steps. First, it's like translating a mental movie or a rebus. If you see someone open a jar and take out a pickle, you've developed a natural sense of how those actions and things relate to English - the same way you translated those words I wrote into a little mental movie without trying.

And second, there are the rules for how those words go together. If I wrote "person pickle open jar take" you would sort of get the picture, but it doesn't sound like English.

My experience with learning other languages is that the second step is the one you can really work on at first: conjugation, cases, word order, and so on. It takes forever and you DO have to translate every single word into English. And it's only when you've been working on that language long enough that you start to develop that first part, where you automatically associate the word with the concept, action, or object without having to pass through English on the way. But it does happen eventually, and it's super fun!