Arabic verbs

Just thought I'd share a moment of frustration with my Arabic training. The hardest thing to get my head around to this point -- depending on how you look at it, roughly 3 years into my study -- is the use of verbs. I still for the most part structure sentences around their English translations. When I'm writing or composing, I'll try to adapt this to how Arabic is actually constructed and review my errors. But when speaking, it's hard. Arabic verbs work on forms. Let's take a really basic form that most learn pretty early: to study, or darasa. Its root is a standard three letters (d-r-s). If you want to say I studied, you use the first, most basic form. But if you want to say "I made myself study," you don't say "I" "made" "me" "study". There's a specific form for the self-reflexive form, and another one that means you did it with some considerable effort. In other words, if you wanted to say "I really forced myself to appreciate...", that has its own single word. And I'm terrible at this. If any Arabic students are out there who have a strategy for this one, let me know. I'm clueless.