[m-r-r]

> I suspect that it would take me many months or perhaps even years of immersion and full-time speaking and thinking in French to get to the point of being able to construct most sentences in "natural French" structure on the first try.

If you have difficulty learning French, I suggest learning another language with a similar "structure", such as Esperanto.

I'm a French native speaker, and I'm currently learning Esperanto. I find the two languages very similar in their way of constructing sentences, but the later one if a lot easier to learn: conjugation and agreement, in particular, are much simpler, and the absence of suppletion (a verb and its derivative always share the same root) helps greatly for memorizing the vocabulary.