I can't decide which was harder to learn, Japanese or Russian. Japanese starts out easy, then throws you grammatical curves worse than anything Hideki Irabu or Kei Igawa deliver from the mound. Russian gave me the grammar willies from the start, thanks perhaps to my friend Leslie's rapid primer on cases and declensions. Russia's alphabet lures the eye because it looks so much like ours, only to trip you up on the "P"s that get pronounced like "R"s. Japanese has three alphabets, and one of them is more than 1,000 characters long.

OK, I'm a language wonk. I started learning French in the fifth grade, and added Italian, German and Japanese later. I worked for the French government and lived in Belgium, where I learned just enough Flemish to confuse people when I said "Ich verstay Flams nie" (I don't understand Flemish).

I didn't turn to Russian until much later, and when I did, I put myself under a lot of pressure. What if I pronounce "Are you hungry" wrong, I fretted, will my child not understand I'm talking about meal time? (OK, those of you who have seen what kids do when hungry can guffaw now.)

So when I started my first adoption, I got Russian language tapes called Express Track To Russian, and drilled every morning on the subway ride to the office. I went back to the tapes before my second adoption, and supplemented it with Just Enough Russian. Since both of these are geared to business travelers, I also used an eight-page crib sheet my agency handed out.

Some of you who are prospective Russian parents are taking Russian classes. I love tracking the Goeppners' progress over the last seven weeks through their blog "Russian Adoption". Especially Week 2, when Chris, who has been waiting--and waiting--to adopt two children from Krasnoyarsk, was tempted to ask the teacher how to say "Give me my children now!"

For those of you who can't carve out time to go to a class, there are lots of language-learning resources on the Internet. There is An Introduction To Russian and Master Russian, both of which link written words to audio files (they were slow to load on my PC, but just about everything is these days since I am running a six-year-old Dell). The blog A Spoonful of Russia takes a different approach, loading the audio portion of the lessons into podcasts.

One more tip. Check meeting sites like Eventful and Meetup for Russian language events. I've found quite a few opportunities to practice foreign languages that way.