Some disjointed thoughts…
Evgueny Bokhanovsky (evgueny40) has created a ton of very useful beginner Russian material (and more) for Lingq. But I don’t know how browse one contributor’s material to find a certain kind of lesson.
The alphabet is easy. It’s phonetic for the most part. Many of the letters are from Greek which helps if you know that alphabet. So “У” makes sense if you relate it to Upsilon instead of “Y”, e.g. And “Р” from Rho, etc. The alphabet is a nice fit to the phonology of the language. Transliterated Russian using the Latin alphabet awkwardly requires a greater number of letters, making Russian’s famously long words look even longer. (West Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet have had to modify it with lots of diacritics and weird łęttęrś.)
Learn some letters, then learn some words written with those letters. Then some more letters and more words. I’d be surprised if any lessons meant to teach the alphabet weren’t organized this way, really.
Don’t be scared by the grammar. I’ve dipped a toe into German, and its grammar almost seems a bastard child between English (no cases) and Russian (extensive cases). It feels to me that Russian grammar is more consistent and structured than German’s, which can help. (Admittedly I’m not expert on German.) The expanded case system (compared to German) helps you more easily see what the role of a word is in a sentence.
Russian genders are much easier than German – there are relatively few words that are not immediately identifiable as masculine, feminine, or neuter.
Not to say there are no challenges. German felt much more familiar, as an English speaker, than Russian. But the challenges are hardly insurmountable. It’s an Indo-European language, so structurally it is more familiar than Korean or Guarani or Arabic.
There are many fewer English cognates in Russian than German, but Russian has borrowed a lot from both languages and shares their Indo-European roots. Can you guess what German word means the same thing as люди (lyudi)? (Spoiler: Leute)
I didn’t learn Russian from scratch here, which limits the range of advice I can give. The approach to grammar that we took in school, though, seemed to make sense and to work: Learn about a certain case and read material that uses it. You can’t have sentences with all one case, of course, but you can still concentrate on recognizing and understanding one case at a time. That can ease things.
Some people pooh-pooh the idea of studying grammar tables. In my personal experience I think it helped. You may not want to make it the center of your study, but the case endings form a certain pattern than IMO makes them easier to remember if you slightly rearrange the “standard” order of case tables to Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Prepositional, Dative, Instrumental. Reviewing an organized presentation once in a while can help make sense of the seeming chaos. But if you’re just starting out, you’re probably a ways from having to think about this sort of thing.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions here when you’re stumped! There are a lot of helpful native Russian speakers and learners here to help. (I think I’ll be around more than I have been for a while, because I want to revive my German learning prior to a trip thither in the autumn.)
Good luck!