Two things happen when you learn another language<p>1) You face &quot;weird&quot; everywhere<p>2) You come to realize some absurdities in your own native language<p>For example, in Japanese, one of the super weird things is counting. You can&#x27;t just say &quot;five apples&quot;. You have to use a counter phrase, which is a concept that I&#x27;ve never seen in any other language (they say Korean and Chinese have the same concept). Essentially a counter is a word you <i>must</i> use. In the apples example, the closest thing to English would be &quot;five pieces of apples&quot;. If you were counting books, you would use a totally different &quot;counter&quot;.<p>On the other hand, learning Japanese has made me realize how absurdly complicated Arabic grammar can be. Every verb&#x2F;adjective&#x2F;noun has to be modified to signify gender, singularity-vs-plurality, first-vs-second-vs-third-person, etc. Every verb tense has about 8 to 12 different conjugations, depending on the (implicit) pronoun.<p>Japanese on the other hand, is deceptively simple (and has more ambiguity) in that regard. The concepts of singular and plural forms pretty much don&#x27;t exist. There&#x27;s no definite or indefinite article. The subject is often not mentioned. It&#x27;s as if you refer to all people in third person.<p>The past tense of a verb does not change to signify anything about the subject(s).<p>On the other hand, it can change for a completely different reason: to indicate politeness level.