What is the most different language to your native language that you have studied?

[nooj]

What the title says. And in what way is this language different from your native language?

Thanks.

[tarvos]

There are so many, but in depth they are probably Korean and Mandarin. Mandarin because of the pronunciation and writing system, and Korean because of its alien grammar.

[aledda]

Similar to tarvos: Mandarin, Japanese and Korean

Spanish is very different from

Mandarin in

pronunciation and writing system

Japanese in grammar and writing system.

Korean in grammar, alphabet and pronunciation

[rdearman]

Mandarin & Setswana. Both of which interestingly are tonal languages. Setswana has some "clicked" sounds. Mandarin writing is completely different.

[Josquin]

Japanese - It has a foreign writing system, vocabulary that is unrelated to any other language I know, and totally exotic grammar. When studying Japanese, I basically had to learn everything from scratch without being able to transfer knowledge from any other language I knew and least from my native tongue, German.

[Axon]

Russian and Vietnamese, though I am not very far with Vietnamese.

Russian for the grammar and very different ways of saying things compared to my native English. At me is a pencil? How many verbs of motion again?

Vietnamese because of the sounds and, again, some grammar. Different tones in all three major dialects, challenging orthography at the outset, interesting "have...not" construction for asking questions.

Indonesian is easy in some respects and often whole sentences can be translated word for word into English. But as it's an Austronesian language, the verb can encode information in ways that stretched my ideas of what a verb is. And though I was already used to it from other languages, you can drop certain parts of the sentence that are crucial to English speakers.

[Chung]

Korean.

Damned weird things compared to my native language (and my other target languages for that matter)

1) Elaborate honorifics/speech levels (the du/Sie or tu/vous distinction has got nothing on the Korean set-up)
2) Use of some kinship terms depends on speaker's gender (for those who don't know, an older brother, for example, is to be called 형 [hyŏng] by a male, but 오빠 [oppa] by a female)
3) Hangeul is an alphabet that apes Chinese writing by having the "letters" rearranged in syllabic blocks (e.g. 삼성 "Samsung" is made up of six "letters" in two groups/blocks of three instead of the frequent convention of allotting one space per letter (and two spaces per digraph)).
4) Lots of loanwords from older forms of Chinese
5a) Chinese and Korean-based sets of numerals with each one being meant to count certain things (e.g. to count for someone's age or number of things (up to 99), you use the Korean numbers but when it comes to addresses, money, phone numbers, dates or quantities over 100, you use the Chinese ones. When telling the time, you use both conventions - Korean (usually) for the hours, Chinese for the minutes)
5b) Counters when quantifying nouns (cf. "two slices of bread" rather than "two breads") with these counters acting rather like noun classifiers in that a specific counter is associated with each of people, paper, bunches or rolls of things, objects with handles, animals, houses, buildings (i.e. other than houses), among several other nouns.
5c) Korean counting for large numbers is based on 10,000 (myriad) as in Sinitic, Japanese and Vietnamese. 100,000 to me is "one hundred thousand", "hunderttausend" (German), "százezer" (Hungarian) or "yüz bin" (Turkish). In Korean it's 십만 [sip-man] or "ten ten-thousand" and this is still tough to put together quickly because of how readily my mind arranges large numbers by thousands or millions.

If I had a background in Japanese or any Chinese language, then Korean wouldn't come off as so weird.

In my other target languages, there were oddities and things that stretched my mind such as fine-ass distinctions in verbs of motion in Polish or Ukrainian, conjugation that depends on definiteness of the direct object in Hungarian, telicity in Finnish, extensive consonant gradation in Northern Saami, and Arabic and Iranic loanwords in Turkish. However the amount of "weirdness" was less than what I encountered in Korean. The further I moved away from English and FIGS, the more different things became linguistically until I hit a real wall in Korean.

[IronMike]

For me, it was Kyrgyz and Lakota. Maybe even Middle Egyptian.

[gsbod]

Japanese for me, for so many reasons, including:

The unique writing system
Verbs come at the end of a sentence, including all those handy phrases I would normally use as a filler like "I think..."
Pronouns don't really exist (there are words for "I", "you" etc but they are optional, and in many cases inadvisable, and in any case behave like nouns)
Verbs don't change for person or number, but rather according to your relationship to the person you are talking to and the person you are talking about
Very little vocabulary is shared with English
Counting - not only the base 10,000 system, but the fact that you have to append a different word after a number depending on the type of thing you are counting (for a language in which it is possible to leave out so many details and still be grammatically and stylistically correct, this feature is oddly specific)
Many verbs come in a transitive and intransitive version
Pitch accent

Japanese - It has a foreign writing system, vocabulary that is unrelated to any other language I know, and totally exotic grammar. When studying Japanese, I basically had to learn everything from scratch without being able to transfer knowledge from any other language I knew and least from my native tongue, German.

My knowledge of Japanese did help out in a few ways when I was a beginner at German. Namely, I could see the parallels straight away between the functions of the German cases and the Japanese particles が, を, に and の, the word order of subordinate clauses in German already felt quite natural, and I was very happy with the concept of starting sentences with anything but the subject. I can see that it wouldn't have worked so well the other way around, however.

[iguanamon]

If I've done FIGS, I've done it a bit differently. Yes, I learned Spanish first. I don't apologize for that. It is one of the most useful languages in my part of the world and I love it. I followed it up with Portuguese, which is a bit outside of the mainstream and also highly useful in the Americas, where I live. I then decided to learn Haitian Creole which is one of the top three languages in my Caribbean region. In addition- I've also studied Lesser Antilles French Creole, again, it's a language I run into often here and was easy after HC.

The one outlier I have is Ladino/Djudeo-espanyol which, while derived from 15th Century Spanish, is quite interesting in how it differs from modern Spanish. It's written in at least four different scripts. The three different Hebrew scripts are read from right to left. In addition to the predominant 15th Century Spanish derived vocabulary, there's also a significant amount of vocabulary from Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Italian and even French. For example, if you have dinner on Sunday in Ladino, you eat it on "Alhad" (Arabic) instead of Domingo (Spanish) and you use a "piron" (Greek) to pick it up and move it to your mouth, and not a "tenedor" (fork- Spanish) which you get from a "kashon" (drawer) in the "depak" (Turkish; also "armaryo"/cupboard) located in the "mupak" (kitchen- Turkish) instead of "la cocina" (Spanish). If your guest asks you for water you'll serve it to her in "una kupa" instead of "un vaso" (Spanish). You'll buy ("merkar" not "comprar") the vegetables (zarzavat) to prepare the dinner from the "zarzavatchi" (Turkish- greengrocer) who is located in the "charshi" (Turkish- market). So, while not straying too far from FIGS, I've managed to get at least some variety.

The most different language in writing for me is Ladino/Djudeo-espanyol which I read from right to left in Hebrew Rashi script, Meruba and cursive Soletreo script. The Turkish, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew vocabulary definitely keeps me on my toes. Half the time, these words are not in any dictionary I have. Haitian Creole derives a lot of its vocabulary from 17th Century Maritime French but its grammar is more West African. There is no gender and verbs use particles instead of conjugations. Pronouns are also free of gender "li" = "he, she, his, her(s)", among many interesting grammatical features. In terms of vocabulary, both HC and Ladino are challenging in their own ways. In terms of writing- Ladino is most different. In terms of grammar, hands down, the most different for me is Haitian Creole.

Edit: spelling