Arnaud wrote:kimchizzle wrote:Je n'ai pas eu beaucoup de temps. [...]
J'aurais souhaité avoir plus de temps pour améliorer mon français...
The imparfait/passé composé mistakes are very frequent. Also very frequent is the impossibility to say "je souhaite que je": simply use an infinitive when you have twice the same pronoun: Il souhaite faire/ Il souhaite que je fasse, but no "Il souhaite qu'il fasse" (the mistake is logic, of course, people learn that after "souhaiter", you need the subjonctive, so they try to put subjonctive everywhere, but it doesn't work when you havetwicethe same pronoun twice). (the word order is more natural-sounding this way in English)
When you know russian and a romance language, learning Latin is an intellectual pleasure, you're in known land for the grammar and the cognates.
Over the course of my formal French education I've heard many "rules" about when to use subjunctive (my first high school teacher said "after que" which is awful to use as a rule since there would be way too many exceptions to be useful). Another one I heard was when you introduce a new subject in the sentence which helps understand the above - if you keep the same subject keep it simple, use the infinitive : Je veux partir /Je veux que tu partes. Elle porte des lunettes noires afin que personne ne la reconnaisse. / Elle porte des lunettes noires pour ne pas se faire reconnaître. As a "rule" it's not bad. Though in style guides I read the second sentence of the second example would be preferable since the other one would be clunkier.