Neither natif speaker of English nor of French. If I misunderstood your question I apologize. For me (based on my experience with learning French and German using English textbooks) is not so useful to learn literal translations (at least in the begining). I prefer to learn set expressions as they are, i.e. fixed. Example:

Je m’appelle Jean Dupont.

The one-to-one translation of this phrase is

I called myself Jean Dupont.

But I think is better to learn it as the equivalent of

My name is Jean Dupont.

Another example:

Faire la grasse matinée

Faire la grasse matinée literally means to have a fat morning. It actually means to sleep in:

J’ai trop bu hier soir, alors aujourd’hui, j’ai fait la grasse matinée.

I drank too much last night, so today I slept in.

Yet another:

Ça va ?

Literally: "it goes"; compare English how’s it going? or German wie geht’s?.