OK, so like.

At school, there are these three Russian brothers who came in near the end of last year. They don't speak English. They don't really have any friends.

I kinda wanna go up and talk to them, but I have no idea how I could keep the whole thing from going really awkward. We've already kinda met before - I introduced myself in Russian and they told me their names - but that's the extent of it. How should I go about it?

Especially foreigners whose mother tongue is one of the Latin/Germanic based languages like English,German,Italian,French or Spanish. Since the phonetic system of those languages is completely different from the Russian phonetic system.

I guess it's theoretically possible because, in contrast, as a native Russian speaker, I became fluent in English after 3 years of living in America and completely lost my accent after about 5 years. But then again I started learning English at a very young age. Do you think a middle-aged foreigner would be able to learn Russian to such an extent that he can speak it like a native speaker?

I have been learning on my own; I know the alphabet and can read Russian to some extent but would like to actually learn the language. Anyone out there who can help?