• mandarin chinese
  • most widely spoken native language in the world
  • non-latin alphabet
  • memorize thousands of special characters
  • each word can be pronounced 4 different ways; each pronunciation has a different meaning
• arabic
  • top five most spoken world languages
  • non-latin alphabet
  • exclusion of most vowels from words
  • written right to left
• polish
  • words are loaded with consonants, which makes them difficult to spell and pronounce
  • "like German on steroids"
  • "being able to speak Polish as a second language puts you in a coveted group, considering Poland’s developing status as a major economy in Europe"
• russian
  • uses a Cyrillic alphabet
  • omit the verb “to be” in the present tense ("I student" instead of "I am a student")
  • extremely politically and culturally relevant language
  • uses a lot of consonants clustered together
• turkish
  • prefixes and suffixes are attached to words to determine their meaning and indicate direction, rather than using separate prepositions (resulting in extremely long verbs)
  • vowels are changed or endings with vowels are added to make a word flow more smoothly
• danish
  • words sound nothing like the way they are spelled

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