Russian is a humbling language

I count myself a bright fellow. I know the parts of speech and could probably diagram a sentence if someone threatened me with something sharp. Generally I can keep my subjects and verbs in agreement, and participles need not dangle at my hand. However I have now discovered that if you want to feel like a low rung on the ladder of civilization, start to learn Russian!

For example I find the following challenging:
No articles - none - nada - nunca - нэт! (a misspelled nyet - I couldn't find the correct key on the Russian layout)
Different alphabet with lots of vowels,,, lots like twice as many as English.
Everything inflects. Now this isn't that different from Latin or Greek except this is a living language not a dead one, and you can put down the book and look up the paradigm for making something a part of the instrumentive case, Instead you are actually speaking and no one wants to leave their conversation partner crocheting an afghan, whilst you feverish skim a tome for the correct way to say Jane built the bridge. (As I understand it Jane would be in the nominative case, built would be a simple past time, and bridge would not be support by an article but instead would take the instrumentive case showing that it was the direct result of Jane's industriousness. Now if Jane were not building but instead crossing the bridge it would be in yet a different case, the case of the direct object AKA the accusative case....

Has your brain exploded yet? Mine did. However, I'm a nerd so all this is fun. However, I am not yet convinced that I will be able to communicate even one word while on my journey. Wow this was a riveting post. What did you expect the name of this thing is "Because I like Hearing Myself Type."

There are more things that I find challenging however I have bored myself to death so I will stop. As my wife will attest, sometimes I bore even myself while talking; this usually results in great laughter. Because nothing is quite as funny as someone who has completely tuned out there own monotone and then realizes what they have done. I'm almost crying right now I'm laughing so hard thinking about it.