[hanamizu]

Oddly, the Cyrillic alphabet was the only easy thing for me during my disastrous 2 semesters of Russian in college. I still use it to write out Christmas gift ideas for my wife. Drives her nuts. The toughest sound for me was ы which doesn't exist in English, is a vowel and has been described as the sound you make right before you are very sick. Russian grammar, for me, was a nightmare.

[GnuThere]

You made it one more semester than I did!
I also enjoyed the alphabet.

[NorseViking]

The trick of Russian language is you don’t need grammar at all to be understood. Just learn the words and compile as you please and use intonation to compensate the lack of proper grammar. USSR was a Babylon with about a thousand native groups who had own language each. Most of them had their own ideas on how to speak Russian for communication with other groups based on the grammar of their languages and the rest learnt to live with it. There are no grammar Nazis in Russia.