Learning German, advice or help appreciated!

[I_am_not_mafia]

One of the things I'm struggling the most with right now is Ihr vs Er.  They sound identical to my ear, and the only way to tell the difference is in the context of the verb, like Er hat or irh habt.  He, you, they...ugh.
But since I'm still learning which verb form goes with which pronoun, I find I'm mistaking this one often.   

I suspect that's because of another difficulty, e sounds like i and i sounds like e. And when spelling a word containing ie in one language it's normally spelled ei in the other language, or so it seems anyway.

The die, der, das for "The" is a tad confusing, but after I hear it attached to the noun a handful of times, I find I'm able to remember it reflexively....most of the time.

I got the hang of that quite easily when I found out that there are several rules to determine the gender. This page definitely helped:

http://german.about.com/library/weekly/aa042098.htm

What I haven't yet learned is the difference between accusative, dative and how this changed der, die and das to something completely different. I'm going to have to make a special effort to learn that I think.