Prescriptivist vs. descriptivist

If I would describe myself, I would say that I'm descriptivist. When I came to the United States, I tried to understand and started to translate everything from English to Russian. But that wasn't easy vocabulary wise and by different grammatical structures. I translated it but when I used it in school, it was completely wrong grammatically and many times I wasn't understood. But my classmates understood that I came from a different country and English was very hard for me to understand at that time. Now same thing goes to Japanese. I have friends that help me out and make me feel comfortable learning this language, even though the grammar structure is very different from English to Japanese.