ILE foreign languages represent

(apart from h, x, b/v, and sometimes k, c, g, j, z)

not what you're looking for but making use of the fewest sounds is kind of efficient: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotokas_language

Russian is pretty much pronounced as spelled - Polish probably as far in the other direction as any language I can think of.

I need create own polish alphabet, it will be gut pic.twitter.com/XYqcRZbtXZ

— ⭐Jag. Thornproof♠ (@SanJaguar) October 10, 2017

presumably thanks to this?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_Russian_orthography#The_post-revolution_reform

my dad's parents* were reds in the 30s: my dad told to me once that he could remember his mum teaching herself russian in the bath, adding that she was learning from a tsarist-era guidebook so it probably would have done more harm than good come the worldwide bolshevik revolution

*one of them ended up very reactionary, the other stayed secretly red till the end in her 90s, i don't really know how they negotiated this personally

adding: my dad was naturally good at languages, picking up the useable basics very quickly -- he taught himself serbo-croat in order to read an untranslated paper abt karst landscapes* and once (in lapland) held a halting conversation with the woman running a post office in esperanto lol

might learn Volapuk one day so I can curse the Esperanto-speaking masses

starting scottish gaelic classes on saturday, something I've been meaning to do for about a decade. procrastination is bad news.

Ashamed to say as a Scot that pretty much the only words I know in Gaelic are a song about porridge

i know next to nothing apart from the words that are similar/the same to the bit of Irish I learned on Duolingo.

I don't think it's incumbent of Scots to know any gaelic - as long as they don't have that tiresome anti-gaelic road sign attitude - I just have always been interested in threatened languages in general and it seems like it makes sense to learn the one that's closest to your home. I was inspired by walking past a classroom at the university I work at here in Vancouver and hearing young indigenous people learning the Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh) language

kinda neat

https://localingual.com/