The Russian language is believed to be one of the most difficult languages to learn. There are good reasons for that. The cyrillic alphabet seems to be a daunting hurdle, the declension of nouns is difficult, there are no articles, and verb tenses appear strange. But although challenging, mastering Russian is not impossible. As soon as most Cyrillic letters and basic grammar patterns are learned, studying Russian starts making fun. The most important thing is to keep exercising! It might be a good idea to learn one new word every day and write it down several times to practice writing.
Russian is one of the top 10 most studied languages in the USA. This shows a comprehensive survey, "Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2006", released by the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) in November 2007. The most popular languages on college campuses were Spanish, French and German. Russian was No. 9 before Arabic.