Иногда мне трудно решаться говорить по-русски перед публикой.

to speak

Breakdown of Иногда мне трудно решаться говорить по-русски перед публикой.

• перед: in front of
• мне: me
• по-русски: in Russian

Questions & Answers about Иногда мне трудно решаться говорить по-русски перед публикой.

Why is it мне трудно and not something with я, like я трудно?

Russian often uses an impersonal construction to talk about how easy/difficult something is for someone:

• Мне трудно говорить по-русски. – It’s hard for me to speak Russian.
• Ему легко шутить. – It’s easy for him to joke.

Here:

• мне is dative case of я (“to me / for me”),
• трудно is “hard / difficult” and works like “it is hard” in English.

So the sentence is literally:
“Sometimes, to me it is hard to bring myself to speak Russian in front of an audience.”

You cannot say я трудно; that’s ungrammatical. The structure is [Dative person] + [adverb/adjectival predicate] + infinitive:

• Мне трудно решаться говорить…
• Ей сложно отвечать на вопросы. – It’s hard for her to answer questions.

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What exactly is трудно here – an adjective or an adverb? How does it work?

Formally, трудно is a short neuter form of the adjective трудный (“difficult”), but in modern Russian it behaves very much like an adverbial predicate – a word used to say “it is hard / it is difficult”.

It appears in impersonal sentences:

• Трудно решаться говорить по-русски. – It is hard to bring oneself to speak Russian.