Some examples of language features alien to English speakers:
* Conjugated adjectives, as in Japanese. To say "it was delicious", you need to say "it is delicious-ed" (oishikatta desu).
* Agglutinative languages, like Finnish or Hungarian, where word order is largely irrelevant and conjugations, not word order, determine meaning.
* Topic/subject languages, like Japanese, where previously defined context can radically alter meaning. "Watashi wa hamburger desu" can mean "I'm a hamburger", "I'll have a hamburger", "If you ask me, it's a hamburger", etc.
* Grammatical gender, as in a whole lot of European languages.
* Tones, as in Chinese, Vietnamese, etc.
Here's a fun survey of the "weirdest languages", defines as those that exhibit the most features from the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS):
https://corplinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/the-weirdes...
* Conjugated adjectives, as in Japanese. To say "it was delicious", you need to say "it is delicious-ed" (oishikatta desu).
* Agglutinative languages, like Finnish or Hungarian, where word order is largely irrelevant and conjugations, not word order, determine meaning.
* Topic/subject languages, like Japanese, where previously defined context can radically alter meaning. "Watashi wa hamburger desu" can mean "I'm a hamburger", "I'll have a hamburger", "If you ask me, it's a hamburger", etc.
* Grammatical gender, as in a whole lot of European languages.
* Tones, as in Chinese, Vietnamese, etc.
Here's a fun survey of the "weirdest languages", defines as those that exhibit the most features from the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS):
https://corplinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/the-weirdes...