>>684
I don't have much experience with Spanish, but from the sentence structure, I would assume it is heavily similiar to English. In context of Spanish, you have a slight advangtage with the phonetics and pronounciation compared to an Englishman, though nothing tremendous.
Compared to English, the grammar is pretty different and the sentence structure is more complex, more descriptive and in general, has more rules. One also uses punctuation more often and there are more rules and grammar theory behind it as well. The phonetics are hard-ish, even for a slav. You'll have to learn a whole new alphabet; the so called azbuka. The hard/soft signs are cancer and introduce more grammar rules. Overall though, I wouldn't say it's a hard languge, you just have to throw away everything you know and learn like a baby. The initial shock and steep learning curve of adopting a new alphabet, grammar rules, phonetics and with all that a vastly different mindset, I think puts most people off, but if you perservere the language it self isn't that hard and is mostly intuitive once you get in the right mindset. I'm no expert, so take it with a coarse grain of salt, just my two cents.
The accent heavily varies all across Russia. Most people also don't speak entirely gramatically correct Russian, but an easier regional version of Russian. So adjust your learning according to your target goal; a conversational Russian is much more easier to learn than classical Russian.