In Gaeilge (the Irish language) the words are difficult to pronounce. They use a Latin alphabet but the letters are not always pronounced the same as they are in English. They have a lot of dipthongs and tripthongs (like aei in Gaeilge). They use the letter 'h' to indicate the preceding consonant has a different sound than normal. Many of their vowels have accent marks (this makes pronunciation easier but it looks strange). Different dialects have different pronunciations. This all results in something spelled like -- Tiochfaidh -- sounding like -- chucky.
Grammar is fairly different as well. Nouns have different genders and declensions which need to be taken into account when creating a plural or possessive form of the noun -- it's not as simple as adding an 's' or apostrophe 's' to the end of a word. However, the worst part is that the beginnings of words also change. So the word for boat can be bád, bhád, or mbád depending on the situation and all of them are pronounced differently. It's not just nouns either. For example, things like adjectives need to agree with the noun so they too have different rules depending on the situation.
I enjoyed trying to learn Irish, but I think it probably would have been a lot more fun if I had lived in Ireland instead of the Rhode Island. I'd love to try the immersion thing.
Side note: I grew up in California, which has a lot of Spanish speakers, so now I can say "kiss my arse" in three languages.
