Once I learned how to transliterate, I was shocked at how similar Russian and English are.
But you can barely have two languages as fundamentally dissimilar as English and Chinese.
“Once I learned how to transliterate, I was shocked at how similar Russian and English are.”
Hmm...when I was deployed to Uzbekistan, I studied Russian to better communicate with the locals who worked on our base. Once I learned to hear as well as see Cyrillic (which is modified Greek) I saw the foreign origin of many Russian words.
As for Russian grammar, my years of studying Latin proved useful, as both languages conjugate similarly with verb endings and both have declensions of nouns; five in Latin and six in Russian.
I can still read Cyrillic and a lot of the meaning just leaps out.