>>In the interests of fairness, what would an American learning Serbian or Croatian or Russian find equally as strange and amusing?
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>The multitude of word forms and their alignment. First of all, nouns, pronouns, adjectives and numbers all have gender (masculine, feminine or neutral). Then there are seven cases, for each of these. Since the adjectives have degrees of comparison as well, that means that each adjective has 2x3x3x7=126 forms (singular/plural times gender times comparison times case). Also, adjective and noun have to be aligned in number, case and gender.
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>Some tenses also have gender (specially past tense and conditional), and of course the verb flexes as you conjugate it, which then means that you don't hear pronouns too often - they are implied in the verb itself.
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>This alignment by gender etc then implies that you can omit a lot from the sentence and still keep the meaning - omission of words is quite common, which can make the language quite pithy, or laconic if you know how. The art is, however, dying.
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>One thing which would be impossible to teach would be the imperfect and perfect forms of verbs - which I tried to explain once - and the fact that the perfect (i.e. those where action has an end, not continuous) have no present tense. Ooops... I omitted the word "verb" in the previous sentence, but since "the perfect" would imply male, plural - it would be completely OK.
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>And before all, there's pronunciation, which is quite simple, once you learn the hard r (quite like the Scottish), đ (something like "dy" in "goodyear" or "wouldya"), ž (equal to French j), and the difference between č (equal to English ch as in "Charlie") and ć (much softer, as in "gotcha")... and the fact that vowels are pronounced as single - we hear "rope" as "roup", which you probably don't notice at all. Eventually, to pronounce properly, you'd need to learn accentuation - we have an incredible system of four accents, the short/long descending/ascending (measured against the next syllable), and one unaccented length.
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>Oh, before I forget: "r" counts as a vowel if between two consonants. We don't say "Serbia" - that's for foreigners who can't pronounce "Srbija" :).
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>Scared enough?

More than enough.