Blog 2; Overview of Chapter 2

In Chapter 2 we've began to cover indefinite and definite articles (un, una, unos, unas) (el, la, los, las) which have taught us that once again gender plays an important role in Spanish. An -o is used for masculine articles and an -a is used to reflect feminine articles. The end of many nouns and adjectives also follow this "o"/"a" rule. However, there are the few that are tricky such as la cantidad, la television, el arte, and el idioma. Learning the tricky endings -ion, -ad, -ma, -ista, and -e can help one to know which article corresponds with the noun.
Last week we began to learn adjectives and the rule that unlike in English, adjectives in Spanish have to agree in number and gender with the modified nouns. I think this makes perfect sense, but I still get confused when trying to translate back to English. In order to check myself I always try to read the sentences back to myself in English (translate), but because the arrangement of our sentences is different in English, I'm sure to a spanish speaker my sentences are completely jumbled up.
Although I don't feel like we thoroughly covered conjugations, the chapter introduces present tense verbs -ar, -er, and -ir. These are easy to remember, but I know the "exceptions" to the -o, -as, -a, -amos, -an...etc, will come soon. Sometimes I feel like we've jumped ahead, (Tener changes to Tengo) weeks in advance of us actually learning the conjugations, but luckily I feel like most of us remember these exceptions. I consider myself to be having trouble with all of this and I had spanish a few years ago, so I really do sympathize for those who have never had any previous classes in it at all.
Gustar, ser, and estar are all covered in this chapter teaching us all that gustar has only two forms (gusta, gustan) and there is a real difference between ser and estar. Ser marks a personality or physical trait, while estar marks location and someone's current state. I'm beginning to finally retain the difference in ser and estar, although sometimes I'm not sure how you can tell. Someone could use -ser to saying someone is happy (meaning all the time), or estar to mean they are happy at that moment. How do you decipher if they are using it improperly?
I've never learned any of language so I wonder if our sentence structure in English is similar to that of other languages, or if other languages have sentence structures more like spanish. Of course because it's been all that I've known I feel like our sentence structure in english makes more sense, I wonder if other languages view it the same way.