Is Russian hard for English speakers?

Russian has a reputation as one of the hard languages, and there is some truth in it. But the reputation is also wrong in interesting ways. Some of the things people fear most are easy, and some of the things nobody warns you about are where the real work is.

The alphabet. This is the bit that scares everyone, and it is the easiest part of the whole language. Thirty three letters, most of them logical, and within a couple of weeks you will read without thinking about it. Unlike English, Russian spelling is largely phonetic. Words are pronounced close to how they are written.

No articles. Russian has no word for the or a. One less thing to get wrong.

A flexible word order. Because grammar is carried by word endings rather than word position, Russian sentences are more forgiving than English ones about where things go.

Cases. Russian nouns change their endings depending on what they are doing in the sentence, and there are six cases to learn. This is the biggest single difference from English and the thing that takes the longest to feel natural. The good news: it is a system, it has rules, and it can be taught step by step.

Verb aspects. Russian verbs come in pairs, one for completed actions and one for ongoing ones. Choosing between them is subtle and takes practice.

Verbs of motion. Russian has an entire family of verbs for going somewhere, and they care about things English ignores: on foot or by transport, one trip or a round trip, habitual or right now. It is famously fiddly. It is also, with a good teacher, perfectly learnable.

Russian is harder than French or Spanish for an English speaker, and easier than Arabic, Japanese or Mandarin. It asks more of you in grammar and gives you more back in logic. Learners who struggled with the loose, exception riddled grammar of French often find Russian strangely satisfying: it is a language with rules that mostly work.

The learners who find it hardest are the ones trying to teach themselves from apps alone, because cases and aspects are exactly the things an app cannot explain to you properly. With someone who has taught it for years, the hard parts become a sequence of manageable steps.

Hard is not the same as out of reach. It just means you want a good guide.