All languages are not normal in that same sense.
Study any language and you will be struck with "weird" all the time.
Study any language and you will be struck with "weird" all the time.
English has many inconsistencies: Spelling vs pronunciation, completely different words for tenses (eg. Go/went), inconsistent pluralisation rules (look up fish vs fishes as one example), "me and" vs "and I" rules, etc.
I've heard many people say that English is one of the hardest European languages to learn. Supposedly, Japanese and Chinese are a different league altogether.
For example instead of common sound based words in writing, they use kanji, which effectively are either small, simple and time-corrupted little pictures, or combinations of less complex pictures.
For example 新 consists of 7 "prime" pictures, of which three are easily recognizable, and as such can be remembered as "axe | standing-up, tree" => "new". ( http://jisho.org/search/%E6%96%B0%20%23kanji )
This is easly memorized but cannot re-use latin-based language patterns and requires creation of entirely new language circuitry in the brain.
Obviously there is also a difference in how japanese children and foreigners learn the language, since children in japan are, since birth, surrounded by kanji and very often see them in context with their meaning, while for foreigners they're completely new and some kind of mental context needs to be established in the first place.
1) You face "weird" everywhere
2) You come to realize some absurdities in your own native language
For example, in Japanese, one of the super weird things is counting. You can't just say "five apples". You have to use a counter phrase, which is a concept that I've never seen in any other language (they say Korean and Chinese have the same concept). Essentially a counter is a word you must use. In the apples example, the closest thing to English would be "five pieces of apples". If you were counting books, you would use a totally different "counter".
On the other hand, learning Japanese has made me realize how absurdly complicated Arabic grammar can be. Every verb/adjective/noun has to be modified to signify gender, singularity-vs-plurality, first-vs-second-vs-third-person, etc. Every verb tense has about 8 to 12 different conjugations, depending on the (implicit) pronoun.
Japanese on the other hand, is deceptively simple (and has more ambiguity) in that regard. The concepts of singular and plural forms pretty much don't exist. There's no definite or indefinite article. The subject is often not mentioned. It's as if you refer to all people in third person.
The past tense of a verb does not change to signify anything about the subject(s).
On the other hand, it can change for a completely different reason: to indicate politeness level.