Russian and German

I really want to learn Russian and German (also French and Spanish, later on). I don't know which one I want to know first, so I'm wanting to study them both at the same time. I'm a junior in college, math major, so I have to do my homework. Is two languages at the same time really a whole lot of work, or is it moderately easily doable?

German is a simple language really. The only hard part is memorizing all the arbitrary articles.

Russian's hard so I hear.

I'd be wary of trying to learn two languages simultaneously. Unless you knew of a school that specialized in speed-teaching you the basics.

For bonus fun :
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/07/how-to-learn-but-not-master-any-language-in-1-hour-plus-a-favor/

>>1
You'll fail at Russian if you try to learn for yourself. Nobody has that much energy. Get a teacher.

I took German and Spanish last semester and didn't have much trouble with it, but Spanish was mostly review of stuff I'd learned seven years ago. It varies with experience.

German requires a lot of work, but if you actually keep up with it it's pretty easy to memorise the basics. However, due to somewhat difference sentence structure and case structure formulating sentences requires a lot of thought at first. It starts off incredibly intimidating, but gets easier the more you do it.

As far as Russian goes, I really know very little about it. For some people the somewhat different writing system would be a huge impediment to learning it, but for others it would probably be an incentive to pay closer attention. Once you get past the different writing system, there do seem to be a rather large number of cognates, but grammar looks like a mess.

What languages do you already know? If you want to know so many languages, why didn't you go for a degree in Linguistics?

German isn't easy and anyone who tells you so probably speaks it poorly or hasn't dealt with any literature or spent any time learning the intricacies of the language.  I would recommend learning German first though, because it shares a lot of grammatical elements with Russian, but there is no initial hurdle of getting used to learning a COMPLETELY foreign word system and making mental connections with words that bear no resemblance to anything in English.  You'll learn important grammar and be able to bring that over to Russian without having to worry about the mechanics and why it is like it is.  This will give you more time to work on getting used to cyrillic and the extremely foreign words you'll need to learn.  This is a big hurdle for English speakers.

Ich lerne zur Zeit Russisch und ohne meine Deutschkenntnisse, wäre ich wirklich verloren.  Die russische Sprache ist eine schwierige Sprache, die Geduld und eine bestimmte Beharrlichkeit benötigt, um unterworfen zu werden.

Man "unterwirft" keine Sprache, man meistert sie.

du hast den gemeinten poetischen Sinn offensichtlich begriffen.

Deutsch ist wunderbar!