Europe's Most Widely Spoken Language

Europe's most widely spoken language isn't English, or French, or German but Russian!  Russian has around 150 million native speakers, dwarfing the second language in Europe by numbers (German, with around 100 million speakers).  Of course Russian doesn't have the global reach of English but maybe that's because Russia is practically a continent in of itself.

Not many people learn Russian due to its unfamiliarity, perceived difficulty and, not least, the Cyrillic alphabet.  Russian is unfamiliar but it's not as difficult as people think (and that includes Russians, who like to think that their beloved language is more complex than other languages) and the alphabet, once learned, actually makes Russian easier to learn - imagine English written close to the way it's spoken.

So, why not push out the boat a bit and learn a language few people dare to?