[Mr. Mopery]

Some linguistic quirks:

1. "No" in Polish means "yeah". So, technically, no means yes. Could lead to problems on a date.

2. Swedes, I believe, can indicate a kind of informal "yes" in conversation with a quick intake of breath. It sounds like "Hyoh!" and can catch a learner off guard. Correct me if I'm wrong here, or slightly off mark.

3. Thai has no tenses other than present. No future, no past, no participles(?). Instead, Thai can be roughly translated like these examples: "I go to store tomorrow", "He watch movie yesterday" or "They go to Cambodia 3 times before."

4. Chinese writing is pictographical rather than phonetic. Thus, an average, literate Chinese person who found a 5000 year old scroll would probably be able to read it, but would almost certainly be unable to verbally communicate with the scroll's author even if they were talking about the same symbols.

5. Not sure about this (maybe somebody can verify) but a friend told me that Japanese has different counting systems depending on what is being counted. Thus objects like books, rectangular and openable, might be counted "one (ichi?), two (nee?), three (san?) where long and slender objects, like pencils, would be counted using different numbers like sasld, lasejfea, aflkfdajl and oijoig (just an example).