>(I have read claims that Russian is particularly difficult though - can anyone comment?) In what way? It uses an alphabet just like Latin-based languages, and

>(I have read claims that Russian is particularly difficult though - can anyone comment?) In what way? It uses an alphabet just like Latin-based languages, and it's more phonetic than English (but not completely phonetic). I'm sure anyone can learn to write/read Cyrillic in a few days if they already know Latin. The actual language is harder than English because of large number of noun/adjective declensions (depending on plurality, case, gender) which would be a pain to memorize for a non-native. But being an Indo-European language it's still pretty similar to English as far as languages go. Chinese, having a completely different writing system, completely different sentence structure, completely different fixed expressions, completely different sounds (and tones!) is orders of magnitude harder.