@Sergey: It's impressive that you can write so well after only 7 months. It seems that motivation has played a role for you, otherwise you wouldn't have reached a higher level than your friends, who may have received the same kind of instruction as you. @Nina: I think that waiting until you're 100% is not the best strategy when learning a language. I'm not saying this is your case, but most of the people who think like this need 4 or 5 years to begin speaking a language. Why wait until you're 100% (which, to be honest, is impossible to reach, even in a native language) if you can start communicating right way? Had I waited to be 100% accurate when I was learning French in France I wouldn't have made as much progress as I have.

@Matthew, I do my best to avoid mistakes. When I was in Russia during my holydays, I didn't open my mouth until I was 100% sure that the sentence I wanted to say was 100% correct. And I even tried to reduce my accent. (It's much about listening carefully to the finesse of a language.) Some people even thought I was Russian. (But that didn't last forever because my Russian is very poor. ;)) I must admit that I don't put much effort into learning. I love reading and discussing. When you know a few sentence, you can easily find analogies. But reading and writing does not reduce your accent so I bought this particular book. @Sergey Yes, same here. Although English is considered as the most comfortable language and although it belongs to the West Germanic languages (like German), not many of us are able to learn proper English. In my opinion, it's because they can't (or rather don't) leave the grammatical structure of their first language. They think in German and replace the German words by foreign ones. I'm pretty sure they aren't even able to learn proper Dutch.

I agree, if you are not motivated and interested in language learning, you won't have any results or they will be very poor. English is very popular in Russian and a lot of people want to know it. However, thinking about my friends, I can say that despite all the school years and two years in university studying it, they can barely construct a few sentences without 5 to 10 mistakes and they can't read books :) I've been learning English only for 7 months now (well, I did learn the language in school and those two years in university but I wasn't interested and I didn't pay almost any attention), but my level is much higher than my friends' levels. So, your interest and motivation are very, very important.) But if your language closer to the language you learn, it helps too. Russian and English are not close, moreover, they are very different. Though I don't know German at all, I guess, German and Russian aren't close too, because they belong to different language groups. I only heard that Americans find German as hard as Russian with respect to their grammars.

That's great. I've downloaded the book you've mentioned. It seems to be quite good. As for the previous comments, I'd like to say that there is no such thing as a 'difficult' language. I've heard of people who learned German in no more than 4~5 months, and people who, although living in Brazil for 15 years or so, could barely have a simple conversation in Portuguese (which is not considered to be a highly difficult language to learn). It's all about commitment. How much effort do you want to put into mastering a language? Are you willing to make mistakes and learn from them, even if you sound like a fool in the beginning? Cheers!