That's pretty funny, I had in some sense the opposite experience. Learning Russian, at the point where I got beyond the beginner stage, I was really put off by the intense prescriptivism. As you learn languages you also learn that they all have their own pet-peeves (usually functioning like class markers). But in Russian it's taken to a point where linguistic diversity is looked down (perhaps apart from specialized slang) even in informal conversations. This is probably also related to the fact that the language famously has very little dialectical variation, which is especially surprising given the size of the country where it originates from.