I've been working on learning Russian for awhile now, several months perhaps, and I still think it's an amazing language. It has a very unique, distinct sound, and while it does seem very foreign to English speakers, taking it step by step can get you to the point of knowing it well enough to understand certain phrases very quickly.
Russian is a Slavic language, like Polish, Ukrainian, Serbian, or Czech. I have read that speakers of different Slavic languages can be mutually intelligible to one another, and I have spoken with a Czech friend who was able to interpret some Russian, though she never studied it. Add this with the fact that Russian is a logical second language in Eastern Europe, and that there are many countries in Europe and the Middle East with minority populations of Russian speakers within them, and you have a language that can be fairly useful. Perhaps the most difficult element for English speakers would be the noun declension. I should probably go on to explain that every noun has cases, which you might be familiar with from Latin. There are six cases; prepositional, genitive, dative, accusative, nominative, and instrumental. Fortunately, for inanimate objects, you use the same word for both nominative and accusative. While I am aware of this rule, I there are many nouns for which I only know some of the forms for, like "Ogon" (fire). Any help would be welcome, and I'm willing to help anyone who I can, though my usefulness migh tbe very limited.
Russian is an Indo-European language, meaning it has some of the basic similarities that all languages in that category share. It has some words similar to those of other European language (Water= Voda, Home= Dom), but in most ways, it is still very foreign to English speakers compared to German or French. On a language difficulty index (Again, specifically for English speakers) , is ranked more difficult than German, Spanish, or French, though still ranked a point easier than many Asian languages.
The logical first step is to learn the Cyrillic alphabet, if you have not already- it is based on the Greek alphabet, much like ours, but letters appearing exactly the same often make different sounds. For example, the word "Russka" (Russian) looks like PYCCKO in Cyrillic. In a way, learning the alphabet is learning some words by default, because you will be able to identify certain loan-words that are not of Slavic origin.
One thing that makes it easier, which you might find encouraging, is that the order in which you arrange the words often doesn't matter so much. Because of the cases, simply using the correct form of a noun indicates whether, say for example, the action is being done to it, or whether the action is being done by it. In English "The flower picks Natalie" and "Natalie picks the flower" change meaning drastically because of the order, but in Russian, you can be understood by simply being sure to use the accusative case for "flower" and the nominative case for "Natalie".
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