Coding from dictation

I've been into Computer Science for a while now. I've got a pretty solid background, but it's just a little bit of this and a little bit of that. While following a backend course I realized I was spending too much time on syntax and just typing things rather than understanding the structure. I struggled to code on my own and that's probably the biggest frustration that comes down to a beginner dev. I could fully comprehend the code which the other person