Before I started studying Russian, I read some Finnish. I found out the words were very easy to both read/pronounce and remember. I think I could learn Finnish pretty good even though it's in a different family than my native language.

The reason I stopped reading Finnish was that it's pretty useless (only 6 millinon speakers in the world or something). Russian seems a lot more widespread, with over 300 million speakers. Is this right? Will I get a lot more out of learning Russian than Finnish?

The problem, however, is that I found out Russian is very difficult . I have learned some words and I can pronounce most words written in the cyrillic alphabet, also write, but it's going VERY SLOW. One sentence can take up to 5 minutes to read! The words are so different also, I find them very hard to remember. I feel having to work with this freaky alphabet makes the whole learning progress slower. Before getting to memorise a word, I first have to "translate" it into my own alphabet so I can understand what it sounds like.

What to do? Is it unrealistic to learn Russian without going to classes? How can I learn words easier, read faster and get to learn the alphabet easier? Right now, when I see a long text in Russian, I only see a soup of weird symbols, I really have to concentrate and read a word letter by letter, and it's just going so slow.

I hope someone can give me some advice to learn easier! Thanks.