[elcid1970]

Exactly! I took Russian when I was deployed to Uzbekistan and at first talked like Boris Badenov (”Look, Natasha! Is moose and squirrel!”)

But I discovered that speaking close to the front & roof of the mouth, almost nasally, made for a more authentic sound. The rolled R is more subtle in Russian than Spanish, this is true.

The greatest initial hurdle is to learn Cyrillic and to hear it the same way as with the Latin alphabet. When the sound of a printed Cyrillic word comes to mind, then it is no longer an impenetrable code. And it’s much easier to learn if you think of it as modified Greek, which it is.

Basic Russian phrases & sentences are learned much faster when you don’t have to transliterate.

[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.

[livius]

European Spanish speakers and Russian speakers put their voices in the same places, and some of the vowels are similar.

Latin American Spanish, like American English, Has different vowels from those of the mother country. It is thought that current English and Spanish vowels in the New World were those dominant in these countries in the 16th and 17th centuries. Over time, European pronunciation shifted up a bit, becoming more distinctive, while North and South American pronunciation of their respective vowels shifted down more to what is called a schwa sound, a kind of neutral.

But in any case, the accent of a foreign language speaker tells you something about your own language, and peninsular Spanish accents and Russian accents in English have a lot in common.

Why? Who knows?