Problem is that it's a super difficult language where you can't draw any help from any other languages you might now. Plus it's obscure and if you move out of Finland you'll likely never use it again. I can see why people don't want to invest huge amounts of time learning it unless they plan to stay for the rest of their lives.
Take this as someone who moved to Sweden and have learned a bit of the language, I don't speak Finnish but have had contact with it through Finnish friends for 5+ years now.
Finnish is hard just because it's too different from our Indo-European languages mental model.
On the other hand, Finnish is easy to pick up if you are going to study it because the written form is very close to the spoken one (even though spoken it will be more colloquial Finnish). If you learn the phonemes you will know how to pronounce words, easily, train your ears to its core minimal pairs and it will help a lot.
The grammar is logical, there are a few exceptions per case, it's just very different from Indo-European languages.
I agree that it's very obscure but I take that for Swedish with the silver lining that learning an obscure language will be, in the worst case, a good party trick.
> I agree that it's very obscure but I take that for Swedish with the silver lining that learning an obscure language will be, in the worst case, a good party trick.
It takes years to become conversational in a language with dedicated practice -- that's an immense amount of effort to put into a party trick for a person with a full time job and other responsibilities.
That is exactly why I said that I take that as a silver lining, I do.
It's my own personal silver lining because I value having a surprising obscure detail about my personality to show to people. It's a thing I enjoy doing, just for the sake of fun, taking someone completely by surprise in a nice way, e.g.: I went to visit Brazil only once since I moved from there, during this trip I met a Swede who lived in Brazil for 20+ years, who runs a Swedish-Brazilian restaurant quite far from major cities and surprising him with a conversation in Swedish was a very cool experience, both for him and I.
I create a personal justification to why learning Swedish could be interesting beyond using it in the country, even more when I moved and had no idea if I was staying here for long, why would I bother to learn it if I didn't find other motivations to interest me?
Learning languages is really interesting, it even helps to restructure your thoughts. People find different drives to do things, that's mine.
I think years is a bit on the high end of that estimate, especially with dedicated practice. I’ve seen people go from 0 to conversant in 60 days in English classes.
I'd guess that the people you've seen have at least one of these things, probably more:
1). Are proficient with another germanic language
2). Have lots of interaction with English even if they don't speak it (lots of folks read subtitles for English media)
3). Have learned a non-germanic language and have an affinity for picking up on language
4.) Have lots of time.
5.) Their conversational skills are limited to a few shallow subjects, and much variance on these cause them to trip up.
6.) You don't see deficits (can they spell? How is their grammar outside of simple conversation? Can they read as well as speak?)
On the whole, no one should expect to have easy conversations in 60 days, regardless of language. These are always exceptions, and are most often small talk instead of including a wide variety of subjects: Simply talking about your own interests in any depth takes some dedication, but hearing about other's interests takes more.
Years isn't on the high end: I took classes. 15-18 hours a week, with a transition to speaking practice in a nursing home (while performing some basic CNA-type work). 2 years of classes. For me, this landed me technically intermediate, but it still didn't take much to get out of my depth of knowledge. This is a pretty normal course. Some folks are faster, sure: But some are slower.
Minor nit. Finnish is not a Germanic language--though perhaps there are some parallels that benefit from knowing German or Dutch. It's a Uralic language so separate from the Indo-European languages that are the primary languages in Europe.
Please don't be snarky in HN comments and please omit personal swipes like "Once again, you are making things up." We're trying for curious conversation here.
Edit: we've had to ask you many times not to break the site guidelines. You've continued to make a habit of breaking them. I don't want to have to ban you so would you please fix this?
I'm not going to take my time to cover all of your points, I'm not using academic terms and yes, making up my own terms to put down what it's been my experience. Indo-European languages share a lot of structure and roots, similar ways of thinking even if phrasal structure are very different between Germanic and Latin languages, the same for Slavic ones.
I choose to do with my own time whatever I prefer, card tricks have been part of it, yoyo tricks in my childhood/teens, and so on. I'm not wasting years learning Swedish because I live in this country and I'm becoming a citizen, it's been a fun endeavour that I started with the mindset that in the worst case it'd be a party trick.
This is my experience, instead of being an ass, try to improve on top of it, you help nobody.
Now please, try to behave as is expected by the rules of this forum, I try to come here to have civil conversations and not expecting this place to devolve into some other cesspool subreddit.
It's not that difficult. Grammar is logical, few exceptions, not many hard sounds to learn for English speakers. I found it easier than Russian for example (took the YKI test for citizenship some years ago).
My inlaws are Finnish... the total lack of germanic/romance cognates makes it very difficult for me to remember any vocabulary. But I've never really put in a serious effort to learn it.
The cognates are difficult, true - there are quite a few old Indo-European words if you know where to look (kulta - gold, kuningas - king, ranta from Swedish strand, i.e. shore). That said, once you've built up a core vocabulary, it's quite easy to learn derived words. For example, kirja, kirjasto, kirjoittaa, kirje - book, library, write, letter. By comparison, you can see how much different all the equivalent English words are due to its mixed Germanic and French/Latin vocabulary, and how much a challenge that makes for non-native learners.
Cool examples! I can definitely see how Finnish would be easier to learn than English, assuming a lack of familiarity with related languages.
Greek is also very synthetic, so a little basic vocabulary goes a long way. I like the word for "waterproofing", literally "against-through-rain-making" (αδιαβροχοποίηση, a-dia-brocho-poiesi)
This has been my experience too. For me as a native Russian speaker, the grammar is fairly easy and logical, what trips me up each time is the vocabulary. I speak passable German and Spanish and those two help me a lot with other Europear languages. With Finnish, if I don't know a root/word, then I just don't know it and that's that.
I live in South India and I find Finnish easy to my ears (I speak Tamil) due to the double consonants and double vowels that Tamil shares.
In fact a Finnish friend of my dad's learnt Tamil via remote from one of our poets .. to get proficient enough to translate some ancient poetry into Finnish!
As a Finn, sometimes when I see a Tamil name I have to do a double take because at first I'll try to read it as a Finnish name. The written forms of the the languages seem to have eerie similarities, though I fully expect them to superficial coincidences.
Actually, the foundation you got with Finnish should be useful if ever you need to learn Turkish, Hungarian or Japanese. Natural languages are like programming languages in a sense -- Haskell doesn't get as much use as C++ but learning Haskell will make you better at C++.
A genetic relationship between Finno-Ugric and either the Japonic or Turkic language families, if it exists, is so weak that most scholars believe there is no evidence for it.
> A genetic relationship between Finno-Ugric and either the Japonic or Turkic language families, if it exists, is so weak that most scholars believe there is no evidence for it.
But from practical point of view, these languages share common features like: vowel harmony, phonetic writing, suffixal affixation, grammatical cases. These skills transfer easily over to the next language, once you learn them with one language.
(Not all languages mentioned share all the features.)
Turkish and Finnish do have the same word structure and very similar sentence characteristics. Both are agglutinative languages with vowel harmony and "floating" word order. Japanese is also agglutinative but lacks vowel harmony. I'd consider scholars who believe these languages are not similar to be quite wrong.
It's true that there is practically no common vocabulary between the tree though. (Hungarian and Turkish share some small amount of words due to relatively recent Ottoman rule, but that's about it)
An Italian friend learning Turkish complained mainly about having to wait until the end of sentence (The Turkish (and Japanese) sentences are canonically Subject-Object-Verb) to understand what's going on. And imagine a native English speaker's frustration when they realize groups of words can come in any order in Latin (and Turkish, and Finnish) and it's the suffixes that make up a word's function in the sentence!
So, my point was that being exposed to a language with a different grammar is simply good mental exercise and will come in handy when learning other, seemingly separate foreign languages, regardless of the amount of people who speak it.
It helps less than you would think. Finnish doesn't share any intelligible vocabulary with Hungarian beyond the loanwords that are also the same in English (let alone Turkish or Japanese which are entirely different language families).
Yes, there are grammatical similarities, no that won't help you much at all in understanding or talking to people...
Finish shares root of around 200 words with Hungarian, it's just the languages diverged and got influenced by their respective regions. For starters, both languages use different letters for the same sounds. Hell, Hungarian uses written form of sz for the regular s sound, and written form of s for sh sound. The long ő, in the end of a Hungarian word, has previously been a diphtong öü or eü and even more previously ev. Finnish e/ä is written as Hungarian under one letter of e.
Then you have switches from h to k, as in Hung. hal (fish) = Finn. kala
Then you have switches from f to p, as in fej (head) = Finn. pää, Hung. fészek (nest) = Finn. pesä
Or, the letter n in Finnish is often replaced by ny in Hungarian, as in Finn. niellä (swallow) = Hung. nyelni, Finn. miniä (daughter-in-law) = Hung. meny
Hungarian and Finnish diverged 4500 years ago, and they represent the opposite spectrum of the Ugro-Finn language group. There are 9 languages in the same language group, and the middle parts of it have more in common with both languages than Hungarian with Finnish.
> Finnish is hard just because it's too different from our Indo-European languages mental model.
I'd imagine having this experience sure helps. Lots of people struggle to give up relying on mental translations to/from thoughts in their first languages.
Can confirm, I have a few years of high school level education in Japanese and Finnish sounds right to my ears, until I pay attention and realize I don't understand it.
I never understood this attitude, which IMO is most prevalent in speakers of Romance languages and adjacent languages. What's the point of learning new languages if you're just gonna relearn 50 different varieties of Vulgar Latin. Is learning slightly different ways to conjugate and spell what is essentially the same word in a dozen different "languages" that interesting?
If however you are interested in reprogramming your language center then Finnish is intriguing, because of its foreign nature.
Spoken and written/theoretical Finnish are quite different. In practice you choose from a small subset of possible suffix combinations and this choice is informed by a lot more than you would first think based on how the theory is presented.
I'm a non-native Finnish speaker. I learned the language in my teens.
It's not a difficult language, at all. It is actually surprisingly simple. The problem is the obscurity - there is very little interest in Finnish as a second language, and the teaching community for it is small and hasn't developed the kind of resources that imperial languages that were taught to countless millions of people during the age of empires (English, Spanish, French) have available. There's just not been a long enough history of teaching Finnish to adults and the resources are poor. My recommendations if you want to learn it:
a) constant low-level exposure to local media - local television has foreign-language films in original language with subtitles - this is super useful as a way to pick up new vocabulary you don't encounter in your everyday life, such as "get to the chopper" :P
b) this is controversial but I think the standard language model used by linguists is too strongly inspired by Latin and a very poor fit for Finnish. I find trying to learn grammar formally is counterproductive and will set you back. Instead, think of the noun suffixes as a preposition equivalent. Trying to think of them as cases will mess with your progress
c) hang around people having conversations and listen. Don't try to understand, just get comfortable with the sound of it. One of the more difficult things with agglutinative languages (languages that stick things together, very roughly speaking) is parsing out bits of words. Early on I'd sit on buses a lot and eavesdrop on random conversations just to get comfortable with the language.
d) Language courses are a poor path to fluency. I know people who spent a decade and a half on language courses and were unable to effectively communicate. If you are in a language course, try to counter its effects by at least equivalent-time exposure to random conversation
e) Music is a great in - it's way easier to remember complete phrases as song lyrics than standalone, and you can listen to an album a few times and then try dissecting a particular song's lyrics to figure out what it's all about.
f) Your primary bottleneck as a beginner is vocabulary - ignore grammar at first, just collect as much vocab as possible. The grammar is so simple and structurally regular that you'll pick up most of it from context, but that only works if you know what the hell people are talking about. Collect words everywhere you can. Read comics, read newspapers. Read medication warning labels. Read user manuals. The latter two are especially useful because they're parallel text so you have the translations right there. Don't try to keep score of how many words you know, keep score on how many word roots you recognize on an average day.
g) Try transcribing things you hear. youtube-dl a news broadcast, play it at 0.75x speed and write it all down, pausing the video if necessary. Don't bother trying to comprehend everything, just write it all down.
h) Use Finnish in boring everyday stuff - supermarket checkout, for example. This is easy low-level stuff and you'll get functional at that level very quickly. Do this way before you feel comfortable. This will give you daily active low-level practice. Use Finnish for all interactions where it doesn't have severe consequences if you're misunderstood.
i) Use media targeted at children. Story books are a great way to get lots of simple vocab in, and also a bit of culture. Go to the library, pick up a bunch of books targeted at 6-12 year olds, read them all. Repeat.
j) It may appear superficially that all the vocabulary is weird and foreign but a whole lot of it is borrowed, just borrowed a long way back. Not so useful early on but you pick up some patterns eventually. A number of phrases are word for word translations from other languages - for example "elintarvike" (food products, groceries) is a word for word translation of German "Lebensmittel". Learning German after Finnish I found a lot of familiar phrases. Going further back, you see a ton of germanic roots in everyday words like "tuoli" (chair). It's not obvious at first until you look at the Estonian version "tool", which is an earlier form of the same word. That is of course an abbreviated version of "stool"/"Stuhl" which is clearly germanic. Again, this won't help you learn new vocabulary but it may help with the feeling of "what the fuck how do they come up with this shit" that you get on first exposure to a new language group.
Expect 18-20 months before you can make sense of most things your colleagues say. Going from there to fluent communication depends entirely on how much you actively use it. It's not hard, it's just that nobody has had a century or two of experience teaching it to adults, so you have to figure out ways of making it work for you. Have faith in yourself. Once you break through the initial "this is so weird" barrier, progress is quick and very rewarding.
> Try transcribing things you hear. youtube-dl a news broadcast, play it at 0.75x speed and write it all down, pausing the video if necessary. Don't bother trying to comprehend everything, just write it all down.
There is also nowadays Yle's Selkouutiset (Simple Finnish news). It's a short daily news bulletin of most important headlines read really patiently and while avoiding using any difficult words (i.e. only basic vocabulary. If complex vocabulary is needed the newscaster actually stops to explain what that word means in simpler terms.)
As a native speaker it hurts my head to listen to it for some reason when it comes on the radio. But I've heard from many Finnish as second language leaners that they find this public service resource really useful.
> b) this is controversial but I think the standard language model used by linguists is too strongly inspired by Latin and a very poor fit for Finnish. I find trying to learn grammar formally is counterproductive and will set you back. Instead, think of the noun suffixes as a preposition equivalent. Trying to think of them as cases will mess with your progress
Interesting point. This is what a lot of people learning the language tend to get overtly confused with. Perhaps your point isn't as controversial as one would think...
> j) It may appear superficially that all the vocabulary is weird and foreign but a whole lot of it is borrowed, just borrowed a long way back. Not so useful early on but you pick up some patterns eventually. A number of phrases are word for word translations from other languages - for example "elintarvike" (food products, groceries) is a word for word translation of German "Lebensmittel". Learning German after Finnish I found a lot of familiar phrases. Going further back, you see a ton of germanic roots in everyday words like "tuoli" (chair). It's not obvious at first until you look at the Estonian version "tool", which is an earlier form of the same word. That is of course an abbreviated version of "stool"/"Stuhl" which is clearly germanic. Again, this won't help you learn new vocabulary but it may help with the feeling of "what the fuck how do they come up with this shit" that you get on first exposure to a new language group.
hehe, yeah that's the second difficult part of the equation. Trouble is that we also borrow a lot from Swedish (which isn't too far from German, but still) and also Russian.
But you're right in that the word formations themselves are pretty logical (maybe this is a Germanic thing?) - for example, computer [tietokone] is literally "information machine", airplane [lentokone] is "flying machine", and my favourite example is the old word for television [näköradio] which is literally "vision radio."
About b) it's controversial because it's the standard model that is used by linguistics and is considered useful, and I think it's net-negative-value for education. That's why I want to make it abundantly clear that this is my opinion and it runs counter to the consensus in the linguistics world.
Yes but linguistics is about studying a language, not speaking it. As someone who has learnt a few languages non-natively, I never once spoke a sentence by thinking about the formal rule I'm supposed to use to produce it.
As in machine learning, just throwing a bunch of training data at my brain (in the form of complete, native sentences) way outperforms building a rule-based system to the point where I just don't bother learning any rules at all.
This is how I learned languages non-natively as well. But even learning a language natively is done that way: you don't give babies grammar books.
We do that as programmers as well: we get familiar with a syntax/grammar just enough so that we could get to reading source code, learning idioms to do things such as open a file, or make a request, or use a regex. The quick tutorial + cookbook works very well in programming.
This is one reason I lean towards Stephen Krashen's work on language acquisition, and his "input hypothesis"[0].
The way I learned every language was by consuming content that increased in complexity and variety. Patterns were acquired.
Having learned a tiny bit of Finnish myself, I totally agree with your points. And actually the „controversial” advices b), d) and f) combined with tips like a), c) and h) is very much what popular polyglots like Benny Lewis („fluent in 3 months“) teach for language learning in general if your goal is to actually speak the language.
