When I was in Japan all the street signs and train stations had a little transliteration in hiragana of the kanji name. Super useful to be able to read it

"Remembering the Kanji," by James Heisig, will set you up real good. I recommend this to anyone who starts in with the 3000+ character thing. It is fundamentally different from rote memorization that they would have you do at school, instead using mnemonics and stories.

What do you mean Mandarin is simpler in this regard? Japanese is partially kanji, while Mandarin is 100% HanZi (kanji).

But yes, grammar-wise Mandarin is definitely easier than both Japanese and Korean.

The diagram says that (Cyrillic ∩ Greek) - (Cyrillic ∩ Latin) is 3 letters, П Ф Г but as the sibling comment says, Λ/Л, Δ/Д and Κ/К are similar enough. That only leaves you with Θ/theta (th as in thin), Σ/sigma (s as in soft), Ξ/xi (x as in fox), Ψ/psi (ps as in lapse), and Ω/omega (o as in ore.) A lot of those are close enough that you can sort of guess, if you know the English names for the letters!

That diagram is rather bad at what it tries to do. Those are also historically and phonetically the same: Λ Л Δ Д Κ К The first Cyrillic alphabet was using the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script , curiously created by Saint Cyril, but then people found it was too difficult, so someone in the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire mashed up Glagolitic, Greek and Latin to create the new Cyrillic (probably naming it as a sorry to Cyril for butchering his nice unique alphabet).

Many Cyrillic letters are Latin-looking, but actually have direct Greek analogues due to the history of the writing system. If you don't know Greek letters, you'd have a hard time guessing р made a 'r' sound. If you do, it's a natural guess.

Regarding culture I was unfortunate I had to briefly learn some russian history.

And why not useful?

Kinda obvious if you studied russia even basic via wikipedia. Russia has absolutely nothing to offer - neither to individuals nor to the world in general. The only thing they ever did are wars. And all inventions etc they copy/steal or those very few are result of research into weapons.

And the people is another story. Go to russia and see for yourslft.

Why would one learn language of this country if you can learn spanish/portuguese etc and get actual value from it or at least be able to communicate with nice people with come culture

She's saying that Ruzzian history and culture doesn't deserve neither recognition nor effort to learn them, at this period of time. It's fine if a person is already partially or fully embedded in those, you can't "unlearn" stuff. But I'm personally baffled at the people on reddit book subs who are clearly westerners and writing that they are actively trying to learn Ruzzian to read some Tolstoevsky. Yeah, I'm impressed, twice, both at the spectacularly low reward/effort ratio and the sheer tone deafness of it all. In 2025. Or 2024. Or 2023. Etc.