[ptaipale]

It depends. Generally, you'll find spoken Chinese is easier than written Chinese. Chinese grammar is actually quite simple, and it's one of the most "analytical" languages, which make it easier to learn than languages that have extensive morphology. The Chinese script, on the other hand, is difficult.

So, a big difference comes from alphabet. I would guess you'd learn reading and writing Bahasa Indonesia faster than Thai, because the former is written using Latin alphabet, and for Thai you'd need to learn a new script.

Russian is related to English while Finnish or Hungarian is not; most English-speaking people still find it easier to survive in Finland or Hungary, because the writing uses familiar letters (even if the alphabet is expanded with new letters made with adding dots and other marks to existing glyphs).

[tigershark]

Learning to read Russian is extremely easy compared to Chinese even if in both cases they use a non-Latin script.

[ptaipale]

Yes of course. Still, the initial sight of Cyrillic alphabet scares off many people.

[wolfgke]

> Still, the initial sight of Cyrillic alphabet scares off many people.

The only rational explanation I can find for this is cold war propaganda. ;-)

Seriously: About a third of the letters are almost identical to their Latin counterparts. If you study some kind of science you already know the Greek alphabet, to which another third of the Cyrillic alphabet is almost identical. After this the last third is not hard anymore. :-)

Seriously: In Germany they say learning the Cyrillic alphabet is something any slightly intelligent person can do in one afternoon (and I hope I could indeed show this to be true). Unluckily the rest of the Russian language is much harder to learn.

[ptaipale]

I don't see propaganda as much of a reason, it's simply that it looks sufficiently different.

But of course you are right that the alphabet is not so difficult in the end. Different people have different learning capabilities, but that "one afternoon" for the alphabet is not unreasonable. Correct pronunciation of the many variants of s (с, ж, з, ц, ч, ш, щ) will take much longer. I have never actually studied Russian, but can quite often understand newspaper headlines just by knowing the alphabet, and several Indo-European languages and Finnish, which has some common vocabulary.