The key to learning anything is to make links/connections/relationships with things you already know. It is much, much harder to start from scratch than to make links to existing knowledge.

Just try to make as many connections/patterns as you can. It doesn't matter if it's always correct/technically correct. Just try to observe patterns/make connections. The following are a list of the different tenses.

I know this sounds horrible, but I actually started reading and making some sense of words without knowing the verb tenses - just by a couple general observations.

I knew the present endings. If the verb contained the full infinitive (hablar/comer/etc) it was either conditional/future and conditional always has "ía". If it didn't have a present ending or the full infinitive, it was past tense.

This isn't advice on what to do, it's just an example of creating silly rules to break it down and having a crutch until you get a better understanding (which comes from practice/exposure).