In my opinion the first thing which english-speaking people have to understand beginning to learn Russian (and wise versa) - is the difference in the whole structure of this to languages. This difference is (in technical terms) in mechanism of arrangement of words in sentences. I give you an example - 3 words known to everyone: "I love you" - this is how it looks in English. Not "Love you I" or "Love I you" but exactly in this sequence. The difference in Russian is that you can arrange words as you want, so: "Я тебя люблю", "Люблю я тебя", "Тебя я люблю" - are all right, but with slightly different colors. The emphasis in this sentence are on first word. So if you use second form you saying this as reason of some previous actions, and translates as "because I love you". The third is sounds like "I love you [not someone else]". And so on in almost any sentences. The main point here is that English sentence is like a matrix of data base in which every word must be on their location to understand overall meaning. In contrast in Russian endings and forms of words are some kind of indexes which point to role in sentence so you can just throw them into sentence and care only about how it sounds and where to put accents. If you have some thoughts about this, please comment :) Thank you.