I think previous experience programming in C++ can be helpful, in picking up Rust faster.

For me, in large part, the borrow checker is encoding in the compiler rules that you should be following in C++ anyway.

A few hours debugging dangling references or iterator invalidation will make you appreciate what the borrow checker is trying to prevent.

You also have experience knowing the difference between pass by reference, pass by const reference, copy, and move.

Also, if you want to keep your sanity, you will learn to take ownership seriously. Deciding what owns what and whether objects will be owned by the scope (on the stack), be owned by unique_ptr, or be shared with shared_ptr is a large part of designing a C++ program.

Again these all map very neatly onto Rust idioms, and as a benefit are enforced by the compiler.

Coming from a garbage collected language where you previously did not have to care about things like that, and now, not only being forced to care, but having the compiler yell at you for every mistake can be a pretty big learning curve.

However, I would say that not knowing C++ doesn't mean that you can't learn Rust, only that it may take a little longer because you have to learn new concepts with regards to memory management and ownership, and so give yourself some slack and do not be discouraged.