I've learned several languages in my life, I'm trilingual now, and I've succeeded on some and failed miserably on others. Here's my experience and advice. Firs

I've learned several languages in my life, I'm trilingual now, and I've succeeded on some and failed miserably on others. Here's my experience and advice. First, I guess you could say I learned Spanish, but really I was so young it never even felt like learning it, so I can't give you much advice from that account, just that speaking it was hard for me, I could literally feel things get clogged on the way from my brain to the sounds coming out of my mouth - it was wierd but went away quickly enough. The only advice here is that you should probably be speaking the language a lot to train those brain to mouth muscles :) The language I really had to learn though was German, it was later in life at around 20 when I started learning it. From German I think the take away is dedication. You have to be motivated and seriously dedicated in order to learn a language. I literally spent hundreds of hours absorbed in German. I would listen to Deutsche Welle radio all the time and lookup words I didn't know. I would always try to visualize everything in my head for new words and grammatical constructs and it seemed to help. When I saw people running it was "die laufen" not because I had to think about running and then translate it, it was just thats what it was. One thing I didn't do much of was learn grammar I found it terribly boring and just learned whatever people on the radio said that I didn't understand. I also spoke a ton with native speakers my then girlfriend being one, but in the very beginning I remember that talking with native speakers was very difficult. What helped a lot in this regard was having a friend who also wasn't a native speaker, we could both easily communicate with each other in German, we didn't use slang and didn't speak very fast, but it helped us get used to it, we'd talk about new words we learned and never spoke in anything besides German. After about 6 months of serious hardcore learning we were both able to carry on fluent conversations with Germans to the point where we didn't annoy them by being too slow and dumb. It was also around this time that things started getting enjoyable, before that it was all work and zero fun, just straining your brain to internalize grammatical rules and meanings of word sounds. After that most improvement just came through reading and learning written formulations since the everyday word-set was more or less mastered, which is another benefit of just learning to speak/understand - the language itself becomes a whole lot smaller. Finally, much later I tried to learn Polish and spent about a month on it before giving up because I couldn't motivate myself enough to go through those grueling months again. One thing I remember thinking with Polish, which probably applies to Russian as well is that it would take longer than German did to get to that same level where you start enjoying things. The grammar was extremely difficult and its phonetical system and vocabulary much more different than the western european languages I already spoke. So in summary, my advice would be the following: 1. Make sure you are really motivated and dedicated to learning it - it sounds like you are :). It will become fun and a really amazing thing that you can read literature and enjoy movies and a completely different culture than your own, but in the beginning its just a lot of hard work so make sure you have the internal motivation to carry you through the rough waters at the beginning. 2. Once you can carry even a broken conversation find someone who's at or slightly above your level that you can talk with and don't fallback to some other language, make yourself use Russian. 3. When you are comfortable communicating without long pauses to think about what word you want to say, find native speakers you can talk with. 4. Listen, listen, listen - radio is the best. You have to concentrate on sounds and their meanings to know whats going on and your brain isn't dumbed into just understanding the visuals like tv or movies do. Also music, especially rap is good if you can find songs you can rap along to and you memorize the words and their meanings as well. 5. Learn any grammar you need to, but don't overdo it. You'll have time later to go into the nitty gritty and all the written language literary constructs. Best of luck