It's like getting in the driver seat of a car and making sure that it's set to the correct distance from the wheel and pedals and adjusting the mirrors so you have good visibility. You could try and adapt to the car instead but it's gonna be uncomfortable and more likely to result in problems (though the problems you can have with a car are a bit more... immediate than the problems you can have with a programming language).
Syntax really is so utterly trivial. In my personal project I went for C# instead of Scala. C#'s syntax is more familiar to most people, but the functional programming facilities (essentially copied from Scala) are absolutely bloody awful compared to Scala. Anything a little bit complicated – just forget it.
Edit: The point I didn't make very clearly above was at the syntax is actually pretty much the same, the semantics due to type differences and limitations really screw things up.