Which concept (cases, tones, agglutination etc) of a language you've learned that's NOT present in your native language(s) has been the most challenging to learn?

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For me, there are a few that aren't in my native language:

  1. Cases

So. Much. To. Memorise.

Though I grew up hearing Russian and understanding a lot of it, learning it turned me off because of those charts of noun case declension. When I finally gave it a try, I realised it actually wasn't the hardest thing in the world if you learn one at a time, practice it a lot, then learn the others this way too.

However, I still think cases are the most difficult thing to get started in a language. You can't just use the word as it is and make sentences by piecing words together, because the lack of case declension throws it off. Even if you memorise ALL of them (WHICH IS HARD), you often have to use multiple cases in a sentence and getting them all right is REALLY HARD.

  1. Agglutination

I've only really come across this in Turkish and Uzbek. Actually learning how to form words is not hard, but remembering which order the many suffixes go in, which words to put them with etc is really hard. And if you're learning Turkish, you have to remember vowel harmony too.

  1. Vowel harmony.

Not all that hard to learn, but when you start speaking more quickly with natives, it can be harder to remember to do it in speech.

  1. Tones

Haven't learnt a tonal language yet, and I'm constantly put off learning Mandarin because of how infuriating this seems to me (plus learning the characters). I really struggle with it.

Hebrew isn't my native language, but I do speak it quite well. Since I learned it as a youngster, I don't really remember anything specifically being hard about it; though I do notice that occasionally I don't make enough use of the synthetic nature of Hebrew verbs as true natives do. I think this is more a matter of practice for me, as I'm quite out of practice now. The same goes for Arabic - since it's so close to Hebrew, it wasn't very difficult for me to learn. The hardest thing is really learning multiple dialects, and that doesn't count as a "feature" of one particular language imho.

What do you guys find hard about languages you've learnt?

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