Mostly the use of old scripts. So for Akkadian Im learning a bit of old babylonian, sumerian and neo-assyrian cunieform. Hittite predominantly uses Old Hittite cunieform with some Luwian glyph writing. Egyptian had me learning a bit of hieroglyphs and demotic. I want to take a more serious crack at Greek/Minoan linear alphabets and those new Elamite books from Francois I back burnered. Ive dabbled in some Eblaite, Ugaritic and Hurrian as well.

The biggest difference has just been the fact that Im a native english speaker. A lot of the grammatical concepts and sounds are relatively new to me. Shortly before Akkadian I started learning Arabic, and that was a huge help getting started with the semitic languages. Its been kind of funny coming back to learn indo-european languages better like Spanish and Hittite. I feel better prepared for certain grammar structures I struggled with when I was younger after learning a bit of some semitic languages and its been fun talking language with my native Spanish speaking coworkers who love to trade language lessons.