I have this problem with long sentences sometimes and I am a native speaker! Here are some ideas to untangle a long sentence: --Make sure you have identified the subject and the verb of the main sentence. --Read the subject and verb with each clause separately to get the meaning of the clause. When my best friend moved to France for her last year of school, she and I spent hours on Skype, trying to stay connected as well as we could until we saw each other again at University, but that all stopped when she got a new boyfriend. Main Subject: she and I Main Verb: spent (hours on Skype) Clause 1: When my best friend moved to France for her last year of school, she and I spent hours on Skype. Clause 2: She and I spent hours on Skype, trying to stay connected as well as we could. Clause 3: She and I spent hours on Skype, until we saw each other again at University. Clause 4: She and I spent hours on Skype, but that all stopped when she got a new boyfriend. You still have to put the meanings of all the sentences together to get what the author is saying. It helps to write it out. When my best friend moved to France for her last year of school, she and I spent hours on Skype. We tried to stay connected as well as we could until we saw each other again at University. But that all stopped when she got a new boyfriend. I'm not the person to help with verb forms, though. My grammar studies were a long time ago! --If a sentence has two independent clauses (with their own subject / verbs) that are joined with an "and" or a semicolon, you can treat the sentence as two separate sentences. In fact, it would probably have been better written that way! The dog ran to the neighbor's house, and he dug a hole in the garden. The dog ran to the neighbor's house. He dug a hole in the garden.