[nekokami]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

For example in Mandarin first tone "ma" means mother, second tone "ma" means hemp, third tone "ma" is a word that is placed at the end of a sentence to indicate a question, and fourth tone "ma" means to insult (among other additional meanings).

Slight correction: third tone ma (mǎ) means "horse" (among other things). The "ma" used to form a question is "fifth tone".

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Japanese isn't that difficult, I also studied it for 6 months. The main problem is that Japanese people are too polite and that is reflected in the language and the way people express themselves.

Complications to learning Japanese (which I studied formally for 2 years in college and on-and-off informally for 20 years since):

1 - It is not closely related to any other human language. (There are some structural similarities to Finnish, of all things, but those are assumed to be coincidental.) This affects vocabulary as well as grammar.

2 - It has three separate writing systems (katakana, hirigana, and kanji), and literacy requires using all three correctly, often within the same document. Only kanji bears any resemblance to any other writing system (Chinese), but is not identical to either traditional nor simplified characters. Each kanji may have several possible phonetic readings, depending on whether it is representing part of a native Japanese word or a borrowed Chinese word.

3 - Speech registers are driven by social politeness rules. For example, women use a different term when referring to themselves ("watashi") than men, who are more likely to use "boku"-- except in formal situations. Relative status of two speakers dictates which grammatical forms need to be used by each. Pronouns are usually left out completely. The Japanese culture is highly contextual and a lot of things are left unsaid.

4 - Grammar is in Topic-Comment form, which is not used in most Indo-European languages, rather than some variant of "Subject-Verb-Object." Verb tenses do not correspond to those used in Indo-European languages. For example, there is a "completed" tense, but not really a "past" tense.

5 - There is a tone system, but it is not like the tone system in Chinese, or even Bantu languages, acting more like a stress marker rather than a phonetic component.

Originally Posted by HarryT

However, it is unquestionably true, I think, that certain languages are very difficult to learn for adult learners if they differ radically from your own language in the way they "work"....Gaelic, as I said, has the reputation of being very difficult to learn for an English speaker.

I misunderstood you. I thought you were saying that Gaelic is considered very difficult for all non-speakers to learn. I completely agree that one's prior experience with languages will affect how easily one will be able to learn a new language, based on how similar or different it is to the ones one already knows.

Do you know if speakers of the Brythonic Celtic languages (Cornish, Breton, and Welsh) have an easier time learning Irish Gaelic (or other Goidelic languages) than English speakers (who do not also speak one of those languages)?