VIvien, the easiest way to learn Russian is to listen a lot of interesting materials and read a lot of easy books (like fairytales for kids and so on). Find something you like to know about and find it in Russian. While studying Russian, have FUN! :D It's much easier than most think. I suggest you to visit our webportal for learners of Russian www.russianeasy.com - it's ful of interesting and useful information :) Hope, mine advices helped you :) Oleg

Because of lots complications in Russian language, you'd better just start learning entire phrases, dialogues. I mean for example you just take dialogue and try to learn its phrases and try to understand how's it built. If you try just to learn words and then grammar rules you'll go mad, because there are so many variations and it's kinda hard to keep it in mind.

Listen to music

I'm agreed, that learning process goes much easier, if you have some funny materials, some games and small stories, which make you smile. For example, while learning German, I found it very interesting to read some anecdots, illustrating certain grammar rules and constructions. One more technique, which I found helpful, was that what I call "key phrases": you firmly learn the whole phrase, which illustrates, for example, the correct use of a verb or word combination (case of the noun or pronoun, preposition, if required, etc.), with exact understanding, why this phrase is constructed so. Then, when it comes to the use of this construction, but with other words, the phrase you've learnt comes to your mind and serves as a template to bulid a phrase you need. In my learning practice this method of memorization gave me better results than just learning words. You can try as well to use color marks to denote, for example, grammatical gender of the nouns.

and also to chat with Russian natives *-*