During the coronavirus lockdown I dedicated myself to learning Spanish, studying about 1-2 hours per day. Within 1 year I was quite fluent, able to have proper conversations with native speakers on any topic, watch movies, read books, etc. I passed a B2 test and was probably closer to C1. Although my Spanish has declined from lack of practice, I'm still conversational and watch stuff in Spanish occasionally.
Recently I took up Russian, and was filled with confidence after my studies in Spanish.
Unfortunately, Russian appears to be WAY more difficult than Spanish. There are way less words which are similar to my native English, more complicated spelling rules, and way more things to memorise like the stress on each word and when to use "o" or "a". A few months into Spanish and I was already speaking, but after over a month of studying Russian I barely know the Cyrillic alphabet and still struggle with basic spelling and grammar rules.
I didn't expect the difficulty to be so dramatic between these two languages, and it's clear Russian is much more of a challenge for a native English speaker than Spanish/Portuguese/French/Italian/German/etc. I have a lot of appreciation now for native English speakers learning languages like Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Arabic.
Any tips or activities I should do in order to help my fluency for Russian? I'm currently speaking with an iTalki tutor once per week who teaches me Russian grammar while explaining in Spanish (laddering). Also, every day I'm using Flashcards of minimal pairs and spelling rules (Fluent Forever method). I've brought a couple of books on Russian grammar too
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