I have done barely any multithreaded coding, but if I had to I would look at akka etc. first; i.e. use a framework!

Java's actually got pretty sane multithreading support. Some classes are doing things that are a bit unintuitive (like this one), but once you grok the Java Memory Model it's actually very straightforward.

I agree with this. Memory safety, plus concurrency built into the memory model, and very well documented API pretty much make it a breeze.

Akka is the only way I could be sure that my concurrent code would most likely not make everything on fire. Especially Typed Akka.

Oh sure - there are lots of great tools to do it these days. My point is mostly that in most cases you can just skip it all together.