Regarding the genders of nouns - it's the same problem with French as well :-) And, for a native Russian speaker it's even more frustrating because the noun meaning the same thing in Russian and French may very well have different genders :-), so you can't rely on your knowledge of genders in Russian when studying French and have to memorize the genders of French nouns :-( Just trying to say that Russian is not that unique in its difficulty, at least in some regard :-)