It's not that hard to learn nor is it significantly different. The borrow checking rules are very simple and something that even novice C/C++ programmers follow, implicitly or otherwise.
The "hard" parts of Rust are the usage of lifetimes in generic heavy code (especially combined with function traits in order to be generic over closures), object pinning, and soundly operating in unsafe. Those are advanced topics to be sure, but they are not something you would expose a newbie to in the early days of onboarding.
The "hard" parts of Rust are the usage of lifetimes in generic heavy code (especially combined with function traits in order to be generic over closures), object pinning, and soundly operating in unsafe. Those are advanced topics to be sure, but they are not something you would expose a newbie to in the early days of onboarding.