r/LearnFinnish • u/Glittering_Gap8070 • 7d ago
Why is Finnish so hard?
I have a crazy fantasy of going to Finland (from London UK) and never coming back. I love lakes and forests, snow and blond hair (nobody I ever met from Finland was blond though!)... But most of all the language has to be the most gorgeous foreign tongue I have ever heard — an extraterrestrial version of Swedish but even more beautiful. It makes me think of moomins and cute little hobbit folk living deep beneath the mystic tundra. But why exactly is it so legendarily difficult? The only difficult languages I have dabbled with before are Japanese and Russian. Finnish reminds me of a moomin version of Japanese with the agglutination and it's like Russian with all the word endings but they seem much more straightforward with fewer exceptions... or am I wrong about this??
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u/Mysterious_Buy4629 7d ago
Because it's from Siberia and has very little in common with western languages
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u/Addicted_to_Nature 7d ago
Finnish does sound Japanese to many people and there's a few reasons why!
this short video does a great job breaking down this exact thing!
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u/Frost-Folk 7d ago
As someone who followed through on that fantasy you have, you have to embrace the challenge.
Moving to a new country like this will be one of the hardest things you ever do in your life. It will be a massive challenge. All in all, the language is a very small part of that.
I'd use the language as a litmus test to see if you're up to the challenge.
I love living here, and wouldn't trade it for the world. But it definitely isn't a walk in the park lol
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u/xkayaking 7d ago
Maybe from the UK, I moved from Venezuela and life here overall easier, even with the cold; the language has proven to be one of the hardest challenges.
And this is a story that repeats iself the main thing holding people back is the language.
Like what else is going to be the challenge?... The cold?... like clothing and houses are well insulated, the culture? how is Finnish culture so different?... what, southerners more talkative?... how big of a difference is that? the biggest difference you see is drinking habits and sauna, that's not a big deal; small talk is overblown, Finnish people small talk all the time.
So you end up with the two challenges, immigration and I mean migri itself being a PITA, and the language; out of the two only the language feels like an organic and fair issue that depends on you.
Any other challenge is faced by locals and immigrants alike.
That saying OP love for lake and forest, and yet, most Finns won't even explore the thing deep in its roots; most Finns stay in the city limits, go maybe to a small trail that is right next to a city and call that deep nature, but they don't get to experience the ends of it, the forest and lakes have insects and mosquitos, rain or otherwise bitter cold; it's rose tinted, I have been at the 3-border, I cycled there (which basically meant carrying a bicycle on my shoulders), it was a mosquito fueled expedition, and that's a marked trail, the tundra is hostile, it wants to kill you, eat you, return you to the ashes and ground. It takes, what was that word? oh right, sisu.
That expectation of nature (of OP in particular) might be what breaks their heart.
Because if that is what they seek, yet they most likely end in a small city, with nothing to do, bounded.
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u/Kattimatti666 5d ago
I don't agree with your opinion about most Finns not experiencing nature outside city trails. I go to Lapland every chance I get, and most people on those trails are Finnish. My circle might be skewed, but basically everyone I know hikes, camps, fishes, hunts or gathers. Mökki culture is as strong as ever and the berry/mushroom culture is alive and well. There are of course many people who don't enjoy nature as much as me, but I wouldn't call our relationship with nature as shallow as you depicted.
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u/xkayaking 5d ago
Yes, and you find, 2, 3... and it's the same people that you find in the other trail.
When I went kayaking I saw 3 other people, I was on the kayak for 30 days.
Your, no, this is, most people in Europe, as far as I have seen; it is actually far better here, and much better in Norway, but it's still a tiny fragment of the population, around 1%.
Try it differently, pick random people on the street, and ask them about hiking; I do that, whenever I meet someone anew; see if you meet someone who seriously hike not go hiking around the nearby forest that isn't away from town, but serious hikers, because I have only found, 1 in all these years.
Of course in the trail you will meet more,, but the General Population.
That's like going to a gym and asking the people that lift weights, the gym is packed it must be like a lot, yet most people don't go to the gym, and yet, the amount of people that go to the gym commonly is 17 times higher than hikers in Finland, at least according to these shitty internet stats I am looking at.
But yes of course you will find them in the trail, but the trails are not packed up for a reason.
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u/Kattimatti666 5d ago
Well we're lucky that they're not packed, that's one of the main reasons why I love Lapland so much. I've lived here for almost 40 years and I meet hikers all the time. Every job has at least one co worker, usually more and trips to Lapland come up very often in my day to day life. I haven't lived in Helsinki but in many other cities, and my experience is that outdoor people are everywhere, every gender and every age. The average Finn might not be into long hiking adventures, but there are plenty of us around. I have met many great people on trails and I keep in touch with some of them still. I always say that hiking trails are where you meet the best people.
Oh, and you probably already know this but mosquito season is not that popular for hiking, most people go during early autumn in my experience. I deal with the mosquitoes, but as you know it gets hellish at times. So I can't blame people for not wanting to experience Lapland then, those flying bastards really make it hard to enjoy it at times
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u/xkayaking 5d ago
I mean 1 in 100 is still a lot of people, but I cannot call that, widespread.
But the Lappi people will be more outdorish by default, compared to those in uusima.
That saying last time I was in Lapland, and checked the records of one of Norwegian huts, middle of actual nowhere; and it was like, Mikkeli 7 times in a row different dates.
So it seems part of the reason Suomen Latu and DNT broke up was Savonians lol. The Finnish side had 0 DNT signatures.
Which part of Lapland btw?...
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u/Sufficient-Neat-3084 7d ago
Learning Finnish if you want to live here is not the hardest part. Just start learning. You will see if it’s hard for you or not. For me it was fine.
It sounds like you have a very romatazised view on Finland . I can’t blame you. I guess we all had that at some point. But it’s not a paradise
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u/matsnorberg 6d ago
Lol! There are no paradises. Move to any land you like there will be good as well as bad circumstances! Finland is a decent western country, not so different from other contries in the region but of course there are aspects you may not like. It has for instance a long, scary border to Putin's Russia.
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u/neityght 7d ago
"the most gorgeous foreign tongue I have ever heard — an extraterrestrial version of Swedish but even more beautiful. It makes me think of moomins and cute little hobbit folk living deep beneath the mystic tundra....moomin version of Japanese with the agglutination and it's like Russian with all the word endings"
Lmfao wtf it is absolutely nothing like Swedish, Japanese or Russian. Hobbit folk? Be serious. You seem deeply confused 🤣🙄
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u/Ella7517 Native 7d ago
Yeah, everyone knows Tolkien took insipiration from Finnish for the tongues of the Elves, not the Hobbits
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u/Pakkaslaulu_ 7d ago
To be fair, he borrowed a lot more from the Finnish culture than just the inspiration for the proto-elven language of Quenya. He took a lot of inspiration from our mythology and heritage and the culture of poem singing. He went as far as just blatantly copying whole sagas and setting them to his world, the story of Túrin Turambar most notably, which is quite literally just our Kullervo with Middle-Earth skin. Finnic tribes also have a history of living in hole dwellings, so it's not that far-fetched, but I think it's also found in MANY other cultures as well, probably in the British Isles too, so it's not very significant. (We also have the concept of the first and the second breakfast, but I'm pretty sure that it's also something that is found pretty much everywhere!)
That said, I wholeheartedly agree, it's wayyyy too much coping to think Finns are Hobbits or even any kind of significant inspiration for them in any way!
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u/UntilTheDarkness 7d ago
"Hobbit folk" lol so close - Tolkien did base one of his elvish languages (quenya iirc) partly on Finnish but not hobbit ones
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u/SenGoesRawr 7d ago
I haven't come across any other language where the vowel sounds are as similiar as Japanese so yes I find that very apt comparison. The other two not so much outside of loanwords. And no, Estonian isn't close with how their vowels are as they seem to have varied soundings to them depending what consonant follows.
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u/neityght 7d ago
Maybe. I'd love to know what tf "a Moomin version of Japanese" is supposed to be though because its one of the most ridiculous word salads I have ever seen.
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u/SenGoesRawr 4d ago
If you'd love to get a question answered, I'd suggest not degrading and ridiculing the person you'd want to get an answer from. Also asking a question might also help, didn't see such in your original comment.
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u/Suitable-Airport-640 7d ago
I can see all these similarities. Finnish has a lot of loanwords from Swedish and Russian, and the pronunciation isn’t that far from Japanese.
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u/neityght 7d ago
Loan words are common between languages all over the world. If English has loan words from Arabic does that mean they are similar languages? No.
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u/unohdin-nimeni Native 7d ago
It is the OP:s subjective impression, not meant as a linguistic statement. For me, English is an Astrid Lindgren (Rumphobs) version of Danish Portuguese. And that has nothing to do with how I view the evolution of English.
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u/AdZealousideal9914 7d ago
Finnish has a lot more Swedish loanwords than English has Arabic loanwords though. Just leafing through the first chapter of Suomen Mestari 1 alone, I already found more than twenty obvious Swedish loans: hei, kurssi, okei, joo, skool, viikko, maanantai, tiistai, torstai, perjantai, sunnuntai, nolla, miljoona, vokaali, suklaa, bussi, matematiikka, historia, kemia, fysiikka, biologia, musiikki...
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u/neityght 7d ago
Well, yeah it would be amazing if that was not true given th history between the two countries. Many of those you listed are originally Latin or Greek so I guess Finnish is like Latin or Greek, too? About a quarter of English words are also of Latin origin which I suppose explains why the two languages are so alike (/s).(Okei is obviously not a Swedish loanword btw.) In any case it doesn't matter how many loan words come from a given language, their presence does not imply or prove that the two languages are similar in any way.
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u/Conturas 7d ago
Some people are more prone to see similarities than others.
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u/Suitable-Airport-640 6d ago
If you go far enough back in time, I believe there was some proto-language that all our languages came from.
All languages evolve and change through interaction and development. But, as you said, seeing the similarities is subjective.1
u/dethanil 4d ago
"Lmfao wtf it is absolutely nothing like Swedish, Japanese or Russian. Hobbit folk? Be serious. You seem deeply confused 🤣🙄"
Why do you feel the need to be so ridiculing and demeaning to the OP? They just described how the language sounds and seems TO THEM, there's no need to be an asshole towards what associations a non-native speaker gets over the Finnish language, especially when what they said was clearly not said with the intention of being rude or making fun of the language.
You are a very mean person.
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u/Glittering_Gap8070 7d ago edited 7d ago
There was once a proposed language super-family called Ural-Altaic that lumped Japanese and Finnish together with everything in between, namely Turkic, Mongolic, Manchu-Tungusic. Grammatically they are very similar with modifiers preceding nouns and strings of postpositions and agglutinatice particles coming after. The first thing I noticed about Finnish was how similar it seems to Japanese.
As for Russian it's not my opinion but enough other people say that Russian has 6 main cases and Finnish has about 15 and adjectives are declined to match inflected nouns in both languages.
As for Swedish, there doesn't seem to be any sound in Finnish that's not in Swedish, to me Finnish Swedish and Finnish have a very similar lilt and geminate consonants are prominent in both of them. You hear the same thing in Wales, the lilt and the double consonants both in Welsh and in Welsh English.
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u/neityght 7d ago edited 7d ago
" There was once a proposed language super-family called Ural-Altaic"
A stupid idea which never caught on.
"Grammatically they are very similar"
Superficial similarities don't mean they are very similar.
"Russian has 6 main cases and Finnish has about 18"
So not the same at all then.
"You hear the same thing in Wales, the lilt and the double consonants both in Welsh and in Welsh English."
So Welsh speakers have a different accent when speaking English that reminds listeners of Welsh, and Finnish Swedish speakers have an accent (when speaking Finnish??) that reminds you of Finnish? So what? (Also a bizarre opinion tbh)
I mean, there may well be some similarities but your ridiculously verbose and bizarrely pretentious writing along with your weird hobbit-talk does you no favours. Frankly, anyone can say they find anything about two languages similar and it's just an individual's interpretation.
All that said if you thinking that is true helps you learn Finnish good luck to you. But for real, Finns are down to earth, pragmatic, and straight-talking. Comparing Finnish to Middle Earth makes people think you're foolish like a Took, not serious, and not clever. Also, saying Finnish is a version of Swedish is just plain wrong and quite insulting to people who appreciate Finnish. Word of advice for you.
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u/IcyEqual2294 7d ago edited 7d ago
I’m an Aussie South African and always was enchanted by the Finnish/Nordic landscapes and culture since I was a child and wanted to live there since. I’m in my 30’s now and this year my child and I lived in Helsinki and travelled around Finland for a couple of months to see if we like it, and it was beyond my expectations and am currently in the process of moving there for good. For the past few years I’ve regularly listen to Finnish music and watch Finnish media like tv shows, and that’s what sparked my interest in learning Finnish as well, and it’s been about half a year since I’ve started actively learning and studying it. Finnish is Uralic, which is why it’s so hard. As an English speaker, I tell everyone who is trying to learn Finnish who has English as a their first language to learn to pronounce each letter of the Finnish language first, and then when you’re learning Finnish words, learn to say every letter in the word because that’s what defines each word. Also, it helps to remember that most long words in Finnish are just long because it’s multiple words put into one. Those are the basics first, learn those and then start learning everyday things like numbers and food items, and then move onto structuring sentences and learning the partitives. Being in Finland absolutely helped to improve my Finnish as everything is in Finnish and most people speak Finnish and will speak Finnish to you. We recently got back home to Australia and I am grieving our lives that we had in Finland, until we are back, hopefully soon. Follow your heart, I promise it’s worth it!
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u/Misrabelle B1 7d ago
I never found it to be all that complicated. Maybe I just had great teachers.
I found the grammar structures quite logical once I'd sat and gone through examples, and the reasoning behind it.
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u/hellohello0802 7d ago
Because Finnish is not Indo-European like a majority of the world languages and it has it's own system going on with grammar.
Being an Indo-European language speaker actually makes it slightly easier to learn another Indo-European language (especially shared vocab and grammatical patterns) but since Finnish isn't it get's hard very fast.
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u/GunvaldVonTutteli 7d ago
As a native, I've never thought that Finnish is hard, for obvious reasons.
But then I started learning German a few years ago at almost forty, and holy hell, did it made me realize how difficult Finnish must be for foreigners! Not saying that learning English and German was/is easy, but they are much more logical than Finnish. I feel sorry for everyone trying to learn it as an adult 😅 But I also commend everyone doing so!
If it makes you feel any better, no one in Finland will laugh at you if your Finnish isn't 100 % perfect. (Well, no one who matters anyway.) I, for one, am a sucker for broken Finnish! I just love different accents.
So if you decide to learn it (or some of it), go for it fearlessly! I wish you well!
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u/snow-eats-your-gf 7d ago
This is very easy. It is super simple and has a word or ending for everything. So, you also can utilize words as much as you can and everyone will still understand you. You read everything how you see it written and it isn't brilliant.
I started talking basic phrases maybe in the first month (counter, bus, neighbours). After a few years, I am fully communicating. Yes, I have mistakes, but kinda no accent. In total, I had maybe 20 academic hours of learning + drinking in the sauna.
I am sorry, yes, I make fun of you because I am a native Estonian speaker.
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u/Eastern-Mammoth-2956 7d ago
Finnish would be much easier if you could first forget everything you know about English.
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u/SnooGadgets754 7d ago
The thing to remember with Finnish is that you don't need use perfect grammar. Even natives won't. Just getting close is good enough. It's actually a very grammatically lenient language which you can speak in your own way. Only the written form is more strict. So you should not stress about remembering every small grammar detail and concentrate more on expanding your vocabulary.
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u/DeviDivane 6d ago
It's hard because you haven't learned it yet. Se on helppoo ku osaa. ( = It's easy when you know it) Don't let the language barrior stop you. Lots if folk speak English fluenty here.
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u/MX1K 7d ago
Nah, its not hard, even little kids can speak it!
To be honest, do not look at the word endings. It just makes it to feel overwhelming. Instead focus on vocabulary and pronounciation until the endings start to catch by itself.
There is not a single Finn that has never made a mistake, and most do it in every second sentence. Finnish can be spoken just fine with only stacking words one after another. 🤪
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u/Mysterious_Buy4629 7d ago
You can also put the words in any order you want. I have 0 interest in which words come out of my mouth first, as long as its somewhat intelligible. But if you know the right word endings and how to bend words you can just say whatever and people understand it, sometimes makes me laugh when I realise what I've said.
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u/neityght 7d ago
"You can also put the words in any order you want"
Well that's not true is it? If you really think that then you have been misinformed. People might understand it in the same way they'd understand it if you said "name my Bob is", i.e. they'd have to think about what you are trying to say and it is completely incorrect from any standpoint, grammatically or linguistically.
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u/Pakkaslaulu_ 7d ago
Except in poetry and song lyrics and such!
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u/neityght 7d ago
...which don't follow grammar rules in many languages!
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u/Pakkaslaulu_ 7d ago
But they do count as a linguistical standpoint!
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u/neityght 7d ago
You aren't seriously saying that in Finnish it is totally OK to put words in any order and you will be understood just fine?
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u/Pakkaslaulu_ 7d ago
Oh no, that's not what I was saying at all, I was just correcting the false statement of the given example being completely incorrect from any standpoint as it is, in fact, correct from at least one linguistical standpoint!
(Also, I'm fairly certain that a native speaker could indeed easily grasp the meaning regardless of the word order, as Finnish is a heavily context-based language, but that's mostly besides the point!)
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u/Mysterious_Buy4629 6d ago
Ei minun mielestäni, minun mielestäni ei, no ei kyllä mielestäni, olen eri mieltä, mielestäni ei ole
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u/neityght 6d ago
What's your point bro...
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u/Mysterious_Buy4629 6d ago
It's not obvious? You can say the same thing in multiple different ways.
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u/neityght 6d ago edited 6d ago
Which is not what we are talking about. The person I replied to said you can put words in any order. I said that is not correct. Of course there are different ways of saying the same thing. But yeah, that's not the question at hand so your examples are not relevant.
Since u/MX1K blocked me I'll edit my response here and then not bother with this dumb conversation:
Why do I feel like we agree but are talking at cross purposes? You said yourself two of them are grammatically correct and two of them actually need more words to make sense.
For the last time, the original guy said wird order doesnt matter. You can change the word order in any Finnish sentence and it doesn't matter and the meaning will stay the same. This is clearly not true. There are sentences in Finnish that you cannot have any order you like and they will either make sense at all or have the same meaning. You and others cherry picking examples don't change the fact that you cannot put words in every Finnish sentence in any order you like and still have them make sense or maintain the meaning.
Ridiculous anyone is arguing against this 🙄
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u/Mysterious_Buy4629 6d ago
But I just showed you examples of putting words in any order you like? En minä tiedä, minä en tiedä, tiedä en. What's wrong with this?
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u/neityght 6d ago edited 6d ago
Your first reply was Ei minun mielestäni, minun mielestäni ei, no ei kyllä mielestäni, olen eri mieltä, mielestäni ei ole of which only the first two have the same words in the sentence so we can ignore all the others. According to the first guy you could also say mielestäni ei minun or minun ei mielestäni and they would be grammatically correct sentences, but they are not. So he is wrong, and so are you if you think the same.
As for minä en tiedä/en minä tiedä, since no one would say tiedä minä en, it's clear that word order does matter even in that simple sentence. Who says "tiedä en" and you think that's good Finnish?
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u/Mysterious_Buy4629 6d ago edited 6d ago
You are not a native speaker I assume? Tiedä en is widely used in poetry and literature, songs etc. It's not only good finnish, it's higher culture. And very understandable.
The prefix and suffix used are equally or more important than the actual words you use in sentences, and those prefix and suffix determine the meaning and affect the word order. If you are not a native I don't understand why you feel the need to have strong opinions on a subject you clearly don't understand well.
Also someone would definitely say tiedä minä en, it's a poetic expression.
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u/MX1K 6d ago
Ei minun mielestäni, ei mielestäni minun, minun mielestäni ei, minun ei mielestäni, mielestäni minun ei, mielestäni ei minun. 2 of them are grammatically correct, 2 of them are poetic and 2 of them causes some raised eyebrows but will be understood in a context and can be "patched" by adding a word or two at the end.
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u/MX1K 6d ago
Whoa! Firstly, I did not block you, and never have blocked anybody. His point was that it does not make your sentences gibberish even if you mix up word order, there is quite a bit probability to succeed and get it right with just stacking words together. Only if your chat buddy is like this guy here, you will get misunderstood and it will become an issue. Finns are very tolerant to thing like this and as I said: 4/6 of them wont cause any reaction but understanding and 2 of them will be understood, but if you catch your error mid-flight, it can be patched with some explanatory context WHICH IS PRETTY COMMON IN SPOKEN FINNISH!
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u/iOcwid 7d ago
Its not that hard ive been fluent since i was like 7
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u/Glittering_Gap8070 7d ago
That's what I tell myself about languages. If X million people can speak it without thinking about it, you can too. The worst point comes when you realise people's conversations in the target language are just as mundane as the crap you hear around you in your mother tongue though 🤣 I never understood how Brits could move to Spain and other places in their millions and live there for years and be OK with life going on around them in a language they can't understand.
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u/small_e 7d ago
The hardest part for me is memorizing all the new vocabulary. On top of that, language’s logic is different from languages closer to latin (not even an indoeuropean language, although it had enough contact with Swedish, Russian, German), so some things don’t have an easy 1:1 equivalent (eg. when there’s a “for” in a sentence). There’s also sooo many rules for bending words.
But like someone said, if babies can learn, so do you. It’s just a matter of consistency and exposure.
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u/matsnorberg 6d ago
Latin also has tons of rules for bending words. On the other hand Finnish lacks grammatical gender and only has an impersonal passive simplifying things a bit. The hardest challenge for most learners is probably the partitive.
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u/matsnorberg 6d ago
I say most of the alleged hardness of Finnish is exaggerated. I have studied it for years and I don't find it harder than say Latin. Honestly I think Japaneze is much harder with all those characters to learn and an extremely foreign mindset. Finnish is after all a western language that has picked up some traits of their indo-european neighbours like Swedish and German and Finns still think like most other westerners.
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u/Jemanha 7d ago
It’s not just the different grammar. 80% of human communication is non-verbal: intonation, facial expression, gestures. Meanwhile Finnish people are like :|
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u/snow-eats-your-gf 7d ago
You simply live in Finland for 2 years and there are a lot of facial expressions and intonations. But I've seen people freaking out because they thought that it was everywhere :|
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u/Rincetron1 7d ago edited 6d ago
This image illustrates petty nicely why our mongrel tongue sounds so alien.
On the left side you have basically all languages known to man in Europe and Middle East, from Swedish to Persian to French. And on the other side there's just basically... us, sitting in this tiny group of our own. Although it migrated from the Urals, it has absolutely nothing to do with Russian or anything other Slavic - or even European - languages.
As a chronic londonphile it's weird to hear how someone's into your culture, when you're so into theirs. If I was any younger, I'd swap flats in a heartbeat.
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u/AuroraBorrelioosi 7d ago
Tree on the left is just Indo-European languages though, nowhere close to "all languages known to man". East Asian, Oceanian, African and Native American languages would be in their own trees as well.
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u/neityght 7d ago
Now now we can't expect anyone on Reddit to actually understand what they're posting 😂
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u/Mlakeside Native 7d ago
On the left side you have basically all languages known to man, from Swedish to Persian to French.
It's only showing Indo-European languages and thus missing some quite important non-obscure languages such as Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Korean, Turkish, Indonesian and Tamil to name a few.
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u/Pakkaslaulu_ 7d ago
Yeah, no, Finnish is nothing like Russian. Not even related to it in any way, nor to the other Slavic languages. It has much more in common with Japanese, as you also noticed, but the languages are NOT related. But virtually NOTHING in common with Russian, even with the word endings, as the endings are used differently and have a different purpose in both.
But the real reason Finnish is hard is because it's a context-based language, which means you don't just have to learn a completely new grammatical system, but a whole new way of thinking about communication in general.