Since my mother language is Spanish and the Spanish verb structure is pretty much the same as in French, I don't have exactly the same problems with French.
My first advice would be to relax and not by translating every single word and tense, get the meaning of the sentence instead, but you already know this.
Second, verbs are not really so different in French and English. The difference between imparfait and plus-que-parfait is (more or less) the same as between "did" and "had done". The fact that there are two simple past tenses (imparfait and passé simple) can complicate things, but it rarely changes the meaning, it's enough to consider them just past tenses.
I remember when I was taught English in high school, how the teacher tried to explain all the different kinds of conditional sentences... My classmates used to be very worried trying to learn all the different verb combinations and labelling each sentence as kind 1, 2, 3, or whatever, I could never see the point, because it's exactly the same in Spanish.
When reading French, I am sometimes confused by past tenses ending in "-a", when in Spanish it's present and future that end in "-a", so I somehow get the feel that the story is being told in present, and I have to actively fight this. In English and every other language it's not uncommon that I have to read some sentence again, carefully fitting word by word in order to make sense out of it, because sometimes the structures are unusual, or some word could have different meanings, and I tend to assume only one of them...