[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.