The most obvious challenge has to do with the Russian alphabet, which has thirty-three letters. While many of the letters look familiar, many of them represent different sounds. For instance, the Russian "С" sounds like the "S" in English and the Russian "Н" gets pronounced like the "N" in English. Of course, there are also unfamiliar letters such as "Д" (which approximates the English "D") and "Ф" (which sounds about the same as the "F" in English). To further complicate matters is the Russian keyboard layout. The only letter that is located in the same spot on both layouts is the "C" and everything else is scattered all over the place so that learning the Russian keyboard can at times interfere with keyboarding in English!

Declensions of nouns and adjectives are also a complication that must be dealt with. When it comes to adjectives, English is simple. For instance, sweet is sweet regardless of its location in a sentence. While learning Russian it is necessary to develop an awareness of six grammatical situations or cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, and prepositional. Further the accusative gets further divided into animate and inanimate, making a total of seven possible case distinctions. But it gets more complicated once you factor in gender and plural forms, so that you wind up with a total of twenty-eight possible grammatical situations. Fortunately, there is redundancy of noun and adjective forms so that there are only a total of twelve forms of an adjective such as СЛАДКИЙ (the Russian word for sweet - pronounced slahd-key). Although I complain about some of the complexities of the Russian language, all in all, learning the language has been a rewarding experience thus far!