I know enough of the basics of C and C++, and their standard libraries to shoot myself in the foot with, and I'm sure invoke undefined behavior in the process (I do realize they are separate but related languages). Rust on the other hand appears to be a completely different paradigm from my primary experience which is in managed languages (e.g., Python, Java, etc.). In particular the borrow checker, while a marvelous idea, I think would pose a quite the challenge to get accustomed to.

it's really not that bad. for a beginning programmer, the places where you would struggle with the borrow checker in rust have a lot of overlap with cases in c/c++ where you would struggle to fix all the errors reported by valgrind.