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Hebrew has the ridiculous feature of changing the sounds of those three letter roots in a such a way that they sound like _completely_ different words to someone who is not already fluent - e.g. kaf and khaf, bet and vet.

The lack of vowels also trips up non-native speakers/readers.

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The lack of (written) vowels is less of an issue than most people think as the vowels tend to come in predictable patterns. Likewise the differences of pronunciation for ב, פ and כ are again predictable. It’s not unlike how in Czech, a consonant in a cluster takes on the voiced/unvoiced quality of the following consonant so that kde is pronounced as if it were written gde. I really think that Hebrew is the most beginner-friendly language of all the languages that I’ve learned.

I mean, that doesn’t sound too far off from what happens in Celtic languages like Welsh or Irish where the ending of one word mutates (softens) the beginning of the next word

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