I'm not studying this language at the moment, but if there's enough interest I may yet post something here. Though Chechen really isn't the easiest language from what I've seen. One obstacle is the not-so-phonetic alphabet, which usually don't show long vowels or diphthongs (and Chechen has a *lot* of them). It also has all kinds of ablaut/umlaut which causes all kinds of weird vowel shifts, and judging by the many conjugation paradigms for "regular" verbs it looks very chaotic indeed:
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/%7Echechen ... b_conj.htm
And that's just the phonology - grammatically, Chechen isn't a whole lot easier (all those noun cases and verb conjugations, while...somewhat...regular, are complicated by all the irregular phonological crap) and the Chechens themselves are not the most accomodating people, and tend to look on foreigners learning their language with great suspicion.
Lesson 1 - "to be"
First we'll look at the pronouns, and the noun classes, of which there are 6 in Chechen.
Со I
Хьо you (singular)
И, иза he/she/it
Тхо we (exclusive)
Вай we (inclusive)
Шу you (plural)
Уьш/уьзаш they
The difference between the two "we"s тхо and вай is that the first one excludes the person being spoken to ("we without you") and the second one includes it ("we with you"). The collective word for the Chechen and Ingush peoples Вайнах means "our people".
Noun classes are what Chechen has instead of genders. Unlike the better known European languages, it uses a letter (в/й/д/б) to mark class agreement. The first two classes relate to human beings, masculine and feminine, they also show a distinction between singular and plural and 3rd person plural vs 1st and 2nd persons. To demonstrate this we'll be using the present form the verb "to be", which will come in handy later as you learn about the verb conjugations.
males:
со ву
хьо ву
и/иза ву
тхо/вай ду
шу ду
уьш/уьзаш бу.
females:
in the singular the marker is ю (йу)
со ю
хьо ю
и/иза ю
and in the plural it's the same as the masculine (тхьо/вай ду, шу ду, уьш/уьзаш бу).
The other four classes relate to objects and all other non-human living beings, and unfortunately there is no hard and fast rule to determine what class a noun belongs to (though there are a few nouns that contain a class marker - Ваша brother - Йиша sister, ВоI son - ЙоI daughter). So just memorize them with each word.
class 3: ю (йу)
class 4: ду
class 5: бу
class 6: singular бу, plural ду.
some example sentences to see how it all works:
иза сан ваша Ву. he is my brother. (lit. he/she/it my brother is)
иза сан йиша Ю. she is my sister.
иза сан цициг ю. it is my cat (й, class 3)
иза хьан чIара бу it is your fish
both class 5 and 6 use the marker б in the singular, so they only way to know the difference is in the plural:
уьш цуьнан чIерий ду they are his fish(plural)
therefore - class 6.
notice also the possesive pronouns - while цуьнан is an altogether different root, сан my and хьан your are formed by a vowel shift.
three more useful sentences to complete this post:
со ______ ву/ю i am ______.
хьан цIе хIун ю? what's your name? (class 3)
сан цIе _____ ю. my name is ______.