The way I got over that barrier to entry was to consider each line of code as conversation. That is, I treated each line of code as a specific line in a conversation.

A lot of languages have a lot of bloat involved that only makes sense after you’re a beginner. That’s unfortunate, because it only makes it harder.

As such, I found that talking out what I want the program to do made it much easier for me to conceptualize what I needed to do.

if (something) then do thisThing;
else doSomethingElse;

while(thisThingIsTrue) doSomething;

Function/Method calls are a little tricky at first, but really they are short hand for a bunch of code. So, you could have:

boolean someFunction() {
if (something) return true;
else return false;
}

if (someFunction()) doSomething;
else doSomethingElse;

Method calls within objects are just an extension of that. Let’s say we have a Pirate class that has the function someFunction().

Pirate{
boolean someFunction() {
if(something) return true;
else return false;
}
}

Then we could say something like:
Pirate p = new Pirate(); //I just created a new Pirate.

if (p.someFunction()) doSomething;
else doSomethingElse;
}