Participles
It is very common for Latin to use a participle and a verb together, where it is more natural in English to use two coordinated verbs. The Commentary contains notes about situations where you may find it easier to translate the participle-verb combination in Latin with two verbs in English.
Also, there is a kind of "imbalance" in the Latin participle system: there is a present active participle, but no present passive - and there is a past passive participle, but no past active participle. For this reason, you will often find a present active participle being used when the action is clearly completed before the main verb, even though you were probably taught that the present participle is used to express action contemporary to the main verb. This is a problem created by the absence of a past active participle in Latin (if you know some Greek, you know that Greek does indeed have such a participle: the aorist).
So keep this problem in mind: when you find a present participle, it could be referring to action that has been completed prior to the action of the main verb.