Cyrillic is easy
Seen from outside, the Cyrillic alphabet looks awesome and mysterious. But you can learn it under an hour and begin reading Russian texts or street signs right away. When you come to think of it, other "difficult" languages are not that easy. Take Chinese or Japanese. If you want to read a real text, you'll need several years of study to learn every single character present in the text. That means several thousand characters to be learned from scratch. And you need to learn how to pronounce them on top. With Russian, however, pronunciation is quite close to the way the word is written. For most word, if you know how to write it, you can pronounce it, and the opposite. Sure, at first you may get a letter wrong here and there, but you'll get the message across.

Vocabulary - many "free" words
Once stripped of its cyrillic cloak, a russian text is like a cat with a tiger mask. It's much easier than you thought! Many words commonly found in Russian are very close to words you already know. Thousands of them! komputer, killer, taxi, vodka, festival, organizatsyia, patriarkh, program, etc.... If you compare this to "supremacists" languages that purged or never accepted foreign words, such as Hungarian, Finnish or Chinese, it means that you can "buy" Russian vocabulary at a 25% discount. Even more if you speak French, German or Italian and have a brief look at the etymology of the Russian word. Click for more....

If you find other aspects of Russian that are easy or easier than expected, write me!