Russian difficult to Westerners?

It is based on Slavic and Turkic language families as opposed to Western European ones.

Many European languages have lost inflections they once used to have, such as case endings of nouns or conjugation endings of verbs. Another problem is flexible word order, which perplexes the understanding, especially for beginners.

It is important what your mother tongue is. A Pole, for instance, would learn Russian faster that a Brit.

For me, a native English speaker who also knows some German and French, Russian seems hard because of the pronunciation, complex case system, flexible word order, irregular verbs, sounds and so on.