Quote Originally Posted by Nichole. View Post
Actually imperfective and perfective don't give me any trouble at all. They seem just like English.
Heh-heh-heh! Oh, how naive she is!

Trust me, Nichole, as you progress in your study of Russian, the imperfective/perfective distinction WILL give you some frustration, in certain contexts. For example, in translating a negated past-tense English sentence such as "She didn't read that book." -- should it be Она не читала эту книгу or Она не прочитала эту книгу?

But going back to noun cases: I began studying Russian in college, but had already taken four years of Latin in high school. And the Latin was a huge help for learning Russian -- not because Russian and Latin are so similar, but because they're both far more inflected than English, and I had already become thoroughly familiar with the "general concept" of noun/adjective cases from studying Latin. (In Latin, there are five basic cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative. So four out of five of them have the same names and more or less the same functions as in Russian, while the Latin "ablative" case to some extent* combines the functions of the Russian instrumental and locative.)

So, Nichole, just as learning the Latin cases gave me an advantage when I started studying Russian, if you can master the Russian cases you'll have some advantage if you decide to study other languages in the future.

*I stress, "to some extent," because the ablative is arguably the most complicated Latin case, and does a lot more besides expressing instrument and location!