Being introduced to the Accusative case (and the panic that ensued)

Duolingo Russian has been quite a blessing to me as I pursue my Russian project. But sometimes, even a nice, free course such as this can't sugar-coat some of the... spikier, less comfortable aspects of learning Russian.

So, the case system. Yes, Russian nouns are inflected with different endings depending on a number of factors, some of which come to mind are number, gender, function (subject, direct object, etc.) whether the preceding consonant is palatalized, whether the noun is animate or inanimate...

Great stuff!

I really do love it, but sometimes I also get the urge to burn my grammar book. What's great is how bipolar my attitude towards Russian grammar can be! There are moments where I feel like a kid in a candy store, and others where I feel like some cruel agent of evil is burying me alive in musty yellowed pages of grammar rules, along with the exceptions to all of those rules.

In other words, there's a fine balance.

In moments like this, I have to go back to why I'm learning Russian, or any foreign language for that matter, in the first place. A few deep breaths. Going back to how fun this can be.

And onwards.

So, I've worked through a few of the cases on Duolingo. Mostly nominative and genitive, which haven't provided many issues for me.

Then I reached the accusative. Here's a play-by-play explanation of my thought process while reading the initial notes:

"Only feminine nouns ending in -а / -я have a separate form. «Мама» is a good example of this class:
ма́ма → ма́му
Neuter nouns and feminine nouns with a final -ь (e.g., «мы́шь») use the nominative form."

Me: "What? Only one gender of nouns has a different ending for this case?! Splendid! Wonderful! Marvelous! I can do this!

Than I read:

"Now we are left with masculine nouns ending in a consonant (сок, медве́дь, брат). They use the same form as in nominative or genitive: living beings ("animate") copy the genitive. Objects ("inanimate") stay nominative in plural. This rule applies to all types of nouns.

With "substances"(mass nouns), genitive may be used instead to convey a meaning of "some" quantity."

ACK. What? For masculine nouns, the ending the accusative borrows depends on whether the noun is animate or inanimate? So depending on whether the thing can breathe or not it either looks like the genitive or the nominative, when it is actually the accusative?

Apparently so.

This may not be as easy as I thought.