I found Japanese to be loads easier than Mandarin, since Japanese is basically a very regular language with the same vowel/consonant patterns of Spanish, and with a great amount of borrowing from English, so there's around a 50% chance that if you don't know the native word you can try the bastardized "katakana" version (eg. 'version' in Japanese also exists as "バージョン", "ba-jyon").
* There is a separate set of numbers for counting people.
* There is no word for the indefinite article ("a" or "an" in English) but the word spelled "an" in Irish is their definite article ("the" in English)
* There is no word for "foot" exactly. There is just "cos" which means lower leg and foot.
* They don't cut up the color spectrum the same way we do. "Gorm" means blue or just dark. "Glas" means green or grey. But there are also words that just mean "dark" or "grey".
* Lots of American slang is actually from Irish. Once you know how to pronounce their spelling a lot of it becomes obvious.
7th heaven -> 7th being best for anything in Irish
bhuail -> whale on (hit), wallop
bladair -> blather
bod, bodach -> bud, buddy
bog (soft) -> bog (marshy area)
bogadh -> boogie
buachill -> boy
cailin -> gal
cion -> keen
ciuta -> cute (as in a cute saying)
cros -> cross
cuid -> kid, kiddo
deifir -> jiffy
fainne -> phony
fomhar -> fall (season)
go leor -> galore
leongsior -> longshoreman (nothing to do with being "along shore"!)
sibin -> shebang
sior -> sheer
slan -> so long
slua -> slew
smidirin -> smithereen
snas -> snazzy
spraoi -> spree
teas -> jazz
uisce -> whiskey