[Secret Agent Man]

Chinese and Japanese are difficult because you have to memorize what characters mean. It’s not extremely formulaic.

Russian was pretty good for me. I didn’t have any other prior foreign languages to get me confused on things like gender of words. I still remember that being an issue for some folks in the class.

[beaversmom]

Did you learn Russian for a specific reason or just something you desired?

[Cronos]

Gender of words is alien to English speakers. But for me, I found this easier than French -- French assigns "gender" so randomly it's impossible to know by a word what it is. Polish on the other hand is simple in that respect -- if it ends in a consonant then its male, if it ends in an "a" it is most likely female (with some exceptions like "mężczyzna" - "man" :) and if it ends in "o" it is neuter