I am a native English speaker, a heritage speaker of German, and I have also studied Latin and Old Norse. I want to add a Slavic language to the languages I know before I move on to non Indo-European languages like Hungarian. However, I cannot decide between learning Czech or Russian. If I learn Czech, I could progress faster due to the language being written in the Latin script. Additionally, Czech has loanwords from Latin and German, two languages that I already know very well. Spoken Czech also sounds more pleasant to me than Russian does. However, Russian is the more widely-used, and is more relevant internationally. Compared to Czech it also seems to have a more copious literary tradition. Recently, I asked a friend of mine about which language I should learn first, and he suggested that I try Russian. Thus, I have been trying to learn the script and the basics of that language.
The grammar of neither language scares me; I'm quite used to languages with a higher degree of inflection than English. However, it has taken me a very long time to learn the Cyrillic alphabet, which is necessary to read Russian. Since my usual method of learning languages is self-study via reading old grammars, this has hampered any fast progress I have hoped to make. This also means learning new words is considerably more challenging. Russian phonology also seems more difficult, especially the distinction between hard and soft consonants and their respective orthographical rules. Should I quit focusing on Russian, learn Czech to get a good base in a Slavic language, and subsequently try to learn Russian again? Or should I continue trying to press onward with Russian?
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