Have you ever thought of language this way? Imagine that you were born in Columbia or Russia. How would your experience learning
Spanish or Russian as your native language be different? Would it be the same? Do languages act as borders that separate countries or a common thread that joins them? What other aspects of life are determined by one's language?
The first thing you notice if you come from a Western European background is that the alphabet is different. It's based on Greek with a couple of Syrian letters thrown in. Some of the pronunciation is different too. But those two things can usually be overcome to satisfaction. Russian grammar can be picked up in a school year if it is taught systematically. The real challenge is vocabulary. Since Russian is one of the most distant Indo-European languages from English, there are few cognates. I.e., you don't get many clues as to what a word means like you do with German or Spanish. For example, the German word for "hand" is "Hand". The Spanish word for "hand" is "mano", from which we get, through Latin, manual, manipulate, etc. The Russian word for "hand" is "ruka". Doesn't sound familiar, does it? And the standard greeting, "Zdrastvuytye" doesn't sound like anything from this world. So what you do is find a frequency dictionary and make recordings of English -> Russian (nouns declined, verbs conjugated). That way you can anchor the Russian sounds to your English. Just listen to it over and over again and it will write itself on your subconscious. That is what is necessary for you to recognize words quickly in conversation. Hope that helps.
