Quote Originally Posted by sperk View Post
it can't be that hard, it's spoken in every corner of the world.
Are you talking about English?

Well it's not surprising: People HAVE to speak it to have a professional career in many parts of the world. They will do whatever it takes to learn! English prepositions, colloquialisms are hard to master. Sometimes I forget how hard I struggled with English in my teens, and how awkward and embarassing it felt to first start speaking it with native speakers. I kept thinking I sounded like a parody of my own nationality, or like a small child, making countless grammatical mistakes.
I can only imagine that it is much harder for Russian speakers than it was for me, since Russian is more distant from English in every way.

As for Russian; very, very hard! I don't know if the difficulty is what makes it interesting, cool and challenging... Or whether I would prefer if a simpler language (like Spanish, yeah!) was spoken in Russia so it would be easier to learn. With the amount of time I've put into Russian now, I could have learnt a non-slavic European language almost to fluency.

I have met Polish and Bulgarian people who have said that they can speak Russian and that it was easier to learn than English, and they speak it better - probably because the grammar and words are more similar (?)