I stoppod learnong Oroboc bocauso of ots wrotong sostom: On tho caso of short voweols they onlo pot o mark sayong “o short vowol comos hero”, bot don’t bothor tollong whoch vowol ot octuallo os!

Or the same without garbling the writing the way the Arabic script does:
I stopped learning Arabic because of its writing system: In the case of short vowels they only put a mark saying “a short vowel comes here”, but don’t bother telling which vowel it actually is!

I know it’s something you can get around because the Arabic grammar does tell what is the only possible vowel in that place, once you know the language very well. But the requirement that I need to know the language very well in order to be able to start reading it, and thus, start learning it, was too much for me. Not an impossible thing, but damn difficult.

And then that of course is exacerbated in non-Semitic languages using the Arabic script, such as Farsi/Dari and Urdu, all of which are Indo-European languages. While in Arabic you can figure out which vowel is meant once you know the grammar very well, in Urdu and Dari that’s as clear as in English. The writing system of Urdu and Dari/Farsi is really as mad as what I wrote as the first line for this comment!
Luckily, Dari/Farsi has a third name: Tadjik. And Tadjik is written with the Cyrillic alphabet, meaning that you do have the full information about vowels visible. So, learn Tadjik well enough and you can then move on to Dari and further to Farsi. Similarly, Urdu is just Hindi with any words even remotely related to religion swapped for other ones. So, one can always learn Hindi, which does show all vowels in a (largely) sensible manner and then move from Hindi to Urdu with relative ease.

But yeah, directly learning a language written with Arabic or Hebrew script is something I won’t be trying. Somali is distantly related to Arabic and written with Latin script, so that’s something I’m trying to learn, hoping it will give me enough of starting boost with Arabic once I understand Somali.

Okay, that was about scripts being annoying enough to move me to learning other languages that are otherwise as useful for my life situation…

Then there’s a thing that really feels almost like an unsurmountable obstacle: Pronunciation systems that have too little differences making very big differences in meaning. All examples of these known to me are tonal languages. There are tonal languages that are just fine. Mandarin, the language spoken in Beijing, has four tones: Rising, falling, stable and wonky. In laymans terms: The tone is a melody. A word with a rising tone begins from a middle-level musical note and ends at a high musical note. A word with a falling tone begins with a high note and ends with a low note. And then there’s the tone where the note remains constant throughout the word. And the one that begins in the middle, goes far down and then returns to the middle for the end of the word. For example the word “ba” means either “eight”, “a father”, “to pull” or “a handle” depending on which of the four melody patterns (“tones”) you use when pronouncing the word. But the four tones are so distinct that I learned them in less than a day when I was hitchhiking in China. (I did have a book to help me, of course!) You can pronounce the four variants of “ba” by yourself right now when reading this, and you will probably get them right on the first try. Not all that bad!

But then there are languages such as Cantonese (the language spoken in Shanghai and Hong Kong) and Igbo (a language spoken in parts of Nigeria). Cantonese has whopping 16 tones. In Mandarin you need to only recognize whether the tone is rising or falling or wonky or flat. That’s easy to hear. But when you have two different tones that are otherwise clones of each other but differ by one beginning at a tiny bit higher note than the other? Get’s too crazy for me!
And in Igbo the tonal system is extremely clear as for itself: Each syllable either has a rising or falling tone, and that’s its. But they are falling or rising such miniscule amounts that I cannot hear them at all! The four ways of saying “aqwa”: áqwá, áqwà, àqwà and àqwá sound like just one and the same word for me, no matter how carefully I listen. I would probably learn to hear the difference if I really put an effort into it… But damn, there are about 7000 other languages to learn out there. I’ll just go for one where such a tiny tiny difference in pronunciation doesn’t completely explode the meaning of the whole fucking sentence! Igbo is an endangered language with 50 million speakers. It feels a bit crazy that a language with as many speakers as the combined populations of Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands and Belgium can be endangered when none of those eight are. But when your language is as difficult to learn as a second language as Igbo is, I understand that people are likely to choose whatever other language is available when they need to communicate across language barriers.