Russian

Hey there, english anon here. I want to learn Japanese, but I don't have the time for such a large and complex language any time soon. Spanish was pretty easy to learn back in high school, so instead of taking on a hard language, I'd like to hit up a medium difficulty one. Russian seems like the perfect choice -- do you think I am underestimating it?

Also, got any great sites you recommend I check out to learn Russian?

>do you think I am underestimating it?

Yes.  Stick with a Romance language.

I want to learn Japanese, but I don't have the time for such a large and complex language any time soon.

The only hard things about Japanese are its writing system, the logic by which sentences are constructed, and the vocabulary which bears no apparent similarities to any language you know.

Russian seems like the perfect choice -- do you think I am underestimating it?

Yes and yes.

I'm interested in learning Russian as well. The first challenge was the cyrillic alphabet, which is actually pretty easy, it didnt take make me longer than a week to figure out. After that I realized that already knew a few words in Russian because I had read A Clockwork Orange, so I knew like horrorshow, droog, devotchka, slooshy, viddy, etc. Up to that point it wasnt that bad, but then I got to declensions and hit a wall, and I'm still having alot of trouble with that. So in that sense, its alot more complex than English. I always have to stop and think about the difference between genitive and dative case, perfect, imperfect etc

I started learning Russian as a hobby about a year go. Learning cryllic is easier than it looks. Also the whole gender thing is a lot easier with Russian than with French, German etc.. because you can tell what gender a word is is just by its ending (most of the time). But once you get into cases, grammar, sentence structure etc..it's pretty much a mindfuck. I can't compare it to Eastern Asian languages since I've never tried to learn them, but it's not easy and it gets very frustrating. I still can't hold a conversation or understand fluent Russian, though I do go through long periods of slacking.

Oh yeah and when you're beginning, make sure you use like 5 different sources to learn the alphabet/pronunciation, and try to find audio files etc.. because every place I look there are slight variations. Some sites/books say "yo", some say "yaw", some don't mention that "o" and "e" are pronounced different depending on where they are in a word etc..

Here are a couple sites I found useful
http://www.russianlessons.net
http://www.masterrussian.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlJw08uMvE4&feature=PlayList&p=62077C49F5A58BEE&index=0 (This guy is pretty awesome, he's got a huge series of lessons that start out with the alphabet and eventually go into somewhat more complicated stuff. I think he's Polish so don't take his pronunciation as perfect)

>medium difficulty
>Russian

Does not compute.

http://www.alphadictionary.com/rusgrammar/index.html

Really good site for beginning.

http://www.freelanguagecourses.com/language/russian/princeton-russian-course-51/

Found this on /t/. It's a full Russian language course that was used in Princeton, so you know it's good quality. They stopped using it in 2004 so the guy who wrote it released it on the net. What an awesome guy.

Hi, OP. I am native Russian speaker. I would like to correspond with you. I would help you with understanding of Russian language and you will help me to improve my English. Say me, if you are agree and we'll share fake emails.