You’re preaching the truth here. I’m an English speaker who learned Russian and then taught russian for a decade or so. Duolingo is not going to help almost anyone significantly. What I mean by that is if you were a casual learner (nothing wrong with that) dedicating 5 to 30 minutes to duolingo a day, you will never be able to do anything other than say a few phrases or maybe pick out a few words of spoken russian here or there. Unless you are a language genius you will never be anything close to functional much less fluent without living in a 100% or close russian-speaking environment for a couple years at least. This is not me calling anyone dumb, russian is just really hard for almost all english speakers and requires an extreme amount of time and dedication. I don’t know if it’s true for other languages but I have a suspicion is that it is.
Russian is an Indo-European language, like English, and therefore has fundamentally similar grammar. Arabic, Chinese, and Korean are much more different (from English) than that.
That said, the State Department's estimation of the difficulty of Chinese is inflated by the difficulty of the writing system, which has nothing to do with the language itself. When people try to rank languages more-or-less objectively by how difficult they are to learn -- without reference to which other languages the student might already know -- Chinese and English are both common examples of the simplest class of languages. There is a theory in linguistics that seeks to explain this finding by reference to the history of "simple" languages -- they tend to be spoken across wide regions and learned by adults for pragmatic reasons. The theory goes that the influx of struggling adult learners changes the language to accommodate them.
Chinese would definitely be easier without the writing system (and I wish my two years of studying it had been verbal and pinyin only). But it's also tonal, which speakers of non-tonal languages generally have a really hard time with.
> which speakers of non-tonal languages generally have a really hard time with.
Is this actually true? I only did some basic Mandarin, but its tonal system is so simple (and plainly transliterated) that it seemed like a non-issue to me. Done & dusted in a couple of hours or so, compared to the hundreds of hours needed for vocabulary, idioms etc. Not to mention the terrifying writing system. And I have no natural advantages, carrying a common disability (native monolingual English), and having only learned German previously.
But English is a tonal language; that hypothetical problem can't be a source of extreme difficulty for English-speaking learners.
(I do have problems with English tones interfering with my attempts to speak Chinese, but that's really not the same problem as "My language doesn't use tones, so I don't know how to produce them". I do know how; I just don't have good control over them.)
English doesn't have falling-rising contours like the Mandarin third tone, so there's at least the difficulty of having to learn a new category of pitch change. I do wonder whether e.g. Mandarin speakers have similar difficulty acquiring the different contours of e.g. Cantonese. Intuitively, I'd expect it to get easier the more different categories one can already distinguish.
I won’t argue with you there, I’m not qualified to compare anything but russian and english (and maybe Ukrainian). I’ve heard others say the same thing you are and my research agrees with that assessment. A friend of mine is fluent in both Russian and Arabic and English and would agree that Arabic was harder. When living in Ukraine I knew a lot of people from the Middle East studying medicine in Kharkov and they mostly all learned Russian very well, I can’t say the same for my english speaking students learning russian in East Ukraine.
I am biased so I personally think Russian is a fantastic language both to speak and read. In addition to the literature and people, russian seems to be the most common non-English language after chinese on the internet which lets me see some corners of the web I would not otherwise.
