Your method won't work. Though both German and English are in the same language family and thus, share a lot of basic vocabulary (with slight modifications), German grammar is much different from English grammar.
My friend sent me a card.
Mein Freund hat mir eine Karte geschickt.
The first thing you notice is English uses the simple past for past events, while German uses Perfekt. That is because tenses in German aren't about the series of events but the intent of speech. So while English has the same auxiliary+participle construction
My friend has sent me a card.
it means a different thing.
In addition, the word order of German sentences is all build on the idea of braces. In English, every item in the sentence has a fairly fixed position. In German in contrary you have a lot of freedom pushing sentence pieces around to get one or another additional emphasis.
To make that work, things belonging together are often split up into two pieces creating an open and close brace. The pieces that are related to those embracing piece are kept inside. And of course, these braces do nest.
Mir hat gerade gestern Abend mein Freund eine Karte geschickt.
This is an alien concept to English speakers. A lot of English speakers consider it counter-intuitive. It makes a lot of sense though as soon as you start thinking in German. You have to embrace it to be able to create beautiful German sentences.