There are 3 generally recognized categories which languages originate from...
1) Indo-European (Including English, Spanish, German, Italian, French,
Russian, and etc.
)
2) Sino-Tibetan (Including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, and etc.
)
3) Afro-Asiatic (Including Arabic, Somali, Berber, Amharic, Oromo, Swahili, and etc. )
Usually when learning a language it is a lot easier to do so by choosing a branch that is within the same family. For example, learning German when you already know how to speak English. The learning curve is a lot higher when trying to learn a language from another category. For example trying to learn Japanese when your native tongue is English.
Russia is actually an interesting case. It's primarily a Indo-European language, but due to it's geographical location it has barrowed several elements from Sino-Tibetan languages. So to us English speakers it looks completely foreign. We'll look at it and proclaim "What even is this shit? How is this even a language?" While a native Chinese speaker might look at the English language and proclaim "这到底是什么鬼东西？这怎么会是一种语言?"
Here's a fun one... try deciphering Russian cursive!
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