No really. I do. I have the alphabet in front of me. I’ll try to learn it first. “Ah, beh, veh, geh…”
Nu, molodets! Vsegda xorosho slyshat’, chto est’ esche odin kotoromu interesuet nash velikii i moguchii..
If you really want to learn the language, I highly recommend the “Teach Yourself” series of books. If you can latch on to college textbooks, however, so much the better. Russian by Ben T. Clark is an excellent text. Just take it slowly - one lesson a week is plenty fast - and try to find locals who speak it.
Udachi tebe!
I took four semesters of Russian in college and knew it fairly well. But then I never got a chance to use it and have pretty much forgotten most of it. I can still say some basic things. Learning the alphabet is the least difficult thing, learning the cases and when to use them probably the most difficult.
I’m very, very out of practice (2 years of high school russian), but I can fake it to a reasonable degree. Basically, I can understand it, but can’t really produce any sentences. I’m sure if I used it for a couple weeks, though, I’d pick it up.
Russian is a very interesting language, though, and if you can get past the alphabet issues, it’s really not that tough to pick up. At least I didn’t find it to be.
I second the suggestion of the Teach Yourself series of books. I went from knowing only ich bin ein Berliner to reading the Berliner Morgenpost with seven-year-old comprehension in only ten months with German.
Bis später, und viel Glück!
My Russian is limited to: da, nyet, spasibo, krasnyi, oktyber, dermo! and Ya ne gavaryu pa-Russki.
I have Learn Russian Now! 8.0 for the computer, and The New Penguin Russian Corse (A Complete Course for Beginners) as the book.
When I was taking Japanese (I used to speak it as a kid, and wanted to re-learn it) we learned the alphabet first. We were reading stuff very quickly, then went on to grammar.
That’s what happened with Japanese. I learned it when I was three and four, but refused to speak it after I we got back to the States. (I suppose it made sense at the time.) My German is rusty, but I think I can still hold a simple conversation.
Danke schoen! Doomo arigato!
Hey, I just got this from a Russian friend (too far away to help me learn – She’s in NYC.)
Well, if they look anything like her… 
Another good book-Dermo! The Russian Tolstoy Never Used-
basically a book of Russian swears and slang. Warning-EXTREME profanity.
Grammar and syntax are always a problem when Americans learn another language.
But the beauty about Russian is that the words are pronounced exactly how they’re spelled…
…that is, once you learn the alphabet.
Heh. Yeah, that’s where I leaned “dermo!”. I’ll have to try to find that book. It’s in my room somewhere…
The Cyrillic alphabet is the hard part. And if you’re familiar with the Greek alphabet, you’re halfway there - a large number of the letters are straight borrowings.
If you’ve studied another language with cases and endings, such as any of the Romance languages, the rest will be familiar. Proper selection of verbs of motion is a bear, but you’ll get to that part. It’ll take some drills to get the list of endings down pat, of course, but even at that, there are far fewer than in Latin. You might need some pronunciation coaching to get the differences between hard and soft vowels down.
But on the whole, it’s one of the easier languages to learn. As has been mentioned, there are no irregular spellings (the Bolsheviks fixed that), except for the extremely-common -ogo/-ego combinations being pronounced -ovo/-evo. There are only a few nouns or verbs with irregular endings, too.
If you’ve been exposed to German or French, a lot of the vocabulary will be familiar, too - they’ll be straight transliterations. Russian is a peasant language, with a native vocabulary barely able to deal with concepts more advanced than planting barley.
i speak russian to my cats. they don’t laugh at grammatical errors.
Peasant language? With a literary tradition like that? (And yes, Tolstoy uses almost only native vocabulary!)
And although I speak perfect German and French more or less fluently, I have had great difficulty with Russian vocabulary. It is about as far away from those languages as it is from English, i.e. there are some international words, which are, however, used very sparingly. (Except perhaps for normalno which is used incessantly.)
But I agree, the Cyrillic letters look hard, but are actually very easy to learn. Take a few days for the alphabet and a few years for the vocab and grammar!
I’m picking up Russian too. I admit it’s going faster because I’m in a class that meets four times a week and reviews every day. And for the first half-semester or so, the prof will let us write “Ya ne znayo” (I don’t know) once on the tests and get partial credit.
It would be cool if I actually got to go to Russia and test it out on people.
I have to agree with TheThill, seeing as I’ve studied many languages, and Arabic and Russian are by far the most complex which I have encountered so far. The other students of multiple languages whom I know agree with me. There are Russian words which have the same root as English, French, German, Spanish or Italian words, as well as others which I recognise from Arabic and Urdu, but I would still say that the vocabulary has been harder than average for me. And as for Russian grammar, I won’t even get into that. Russian and Arabic are the only languages I have encountered in which it is rare to find even a native speaker who has reached the top level of grammatical proficiency. Of course, if Elvis is God, maybe ElvisL1ves is guided by higher powers in his endeavours…
Hey, we’re trying to encourage the guy, folks.
Re borrowed vocabulary: I’ve found that being familiar with the language a word is borrowed from can actually hinder my ease of learning it in the subject language. I gave up on Italian because I couldn’t keep from thinking of the similar French word, for instance. Maybe not knowing German beyond the basics has helped me learn Russian vocabulary more easily.
Re grammar: Yes, nuances of meaning are conveyed mostly by word order in Russian, but the basic rules of subject/verb agreement etc. are solid and fairly simple. To become a master of literary styling and oratory is rare for Russians, yes, but it’s rare for writers and speakers of other languages, too.
Re “peasant language”: Tolstoy was a master, yes, but he didn’t write about concepts more advanced than planting barley. I’m sticking with that comment.
Re rocking chair’s cat: Talleyrand said “I speak French to God, Italian to women, English to men, and German to my horse.”
Checking back in. One side, folks, here comes the street cred.
Self-taught beginning in 1986. Majored in the language at Georgetown, 1993-1997. Academic year in St. Petersburg, 1995-1996. Actively speak and read on a daily basis. This my turf, punks! What?? 
Johnny - The New Penguin Course is also a good book. It’s the second one I used, after a really old copy of Hugo’s Russian Grammar Simplified I picked up at a flea market. I was reading newspapers with good comprehension after I got through with that book.
Testify, bro!!
Guin, you should know better than that. Recommending a book of mat to a beginning student is like giving a baby a warm bottle of nitroglycerine. Johnny - forget looking for that book and concentrate on learning the language without the use of foul expressions. Russians take swearing very seriously - to them it is the mark of a grave lack of culture and Russian girls will most assuredly not love you if you start swearing in front of them. I’ve had experience enough slipping up in front of friends to know what I’m talking about here. Don’t do it.
You drastically underestimate the power and beauty of Russian literature. The whole of the nineteenth century is marked by the conflict of medieval tsarism and the forces of progress, and it is admirably reflected in works bearing the names of such luminaries as Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and the one and only Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. The early twentieth century produced people like Mayakovsky and Gorky, and later came authors like Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn. Read some of them, and if you still think Russian authors didn’t write about concepts more advanced than planting barley… read 'em again. 'Cos you’re not reading 'em carefully enough.
olentzero, maybe you’re not reading other posts carefully enough. I was referring to the native, vs. borrowed, vocabulary of the language, NOT to any authors that use the language. Most English vocabulary is borrowed too, but that in no way detracts from the power of the English language in the hands of a master.
Why, have you read Russian novels in the original?
How odd, Olentzero, my boyfriend majored in Russian from Georgetown University too, 1994-1998, with a Junior Year Abroad at St. Petersburg. You and he must surely know each other!!!
Quite possibly. Who is he? I’m assuming he hit Piter the year after I did since his junior year would have been 96-97.