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<p>You are the first person I have ever heard voice this opinion, including native Russian speakers. Of course, it depends what you are comparing it to, and it depends what level of written and spoken mastery is the goal.</p>
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<p>Frankly, I think these are unsupported generalizations. In addition, the grading of the subject has nothing to do with the difficulty of mastering it. On the D list, anthropology was listed as one of the lower-grading departments, lower-grading than Chinese and Arabic. I doubt you would suggest that anthropology is more difficult to master than those languages.</p>