voodie wrote:tarvos wrote: I found the vocab much harder.
Really?
I mean, I can hardly analyze Russian from a foreigner's perspective, but, basic vocabulary aside, there are lots of loanwords (probably up to 20% in some newspaper articles) and hundreds of native words are built exactly like their German equivalents ("Aus-stell-ung" and "вы-став-ка", "ab-sagen" and "от-казать") and so on.
From what I heard from several American students, the most important thing is to get to the intermediate level, and then Russian suddenly doesn't feel that foreign anymore... which is the direct opposite of what I experienced with Arabic, for instance.
The construction is very logical. There are just a lot of weird roots and they can crop up anytime.