There are some language features that are just easier than their alternatives -- for example, written Finnish is phonetic. Compared to English, his has massive

There are some language features that are just easier than their alternatives -- for example, written Finnish is phonetic. Compared to English, his has massive advantages both when first learning to read and when learning Finnish as a second language -- to learn to correctly pronounce Finnish, you need to learn 29 phonemes and their corresponding letters (One lacks a letter and is marked by ng/nk instead -- the guy who defined the written language missed it.), and the length of their long forms. After you've learned them, to correctly pronounce any Finnish word you just string together the sounds of the letters of the word. That's not to say Finnish is an easier language than English -- even if our writing system is strictly superior, as a fenno-ugric language we've got boatloads of other crap that drags us down :). There's plenty of interesting history in how Finnish got this way. In a nutshell, the protestant reformation hit Finland before there was a written Finnish language. Since everyone being able to read the bible on their own was kind of important for the Lutherans, this posed a problem for the clergy. So, to fix it, one particularly active scribe named Michael Agricola went and defined the basic form of written Finnish on his own. He wanted to make it easy to learn to read, and so made it very simple. However, as spoken Finnish was an old language, much of it didn't fit in the straightjacket of a language he had created. His solution? By then he had become the bishop of Turku, and could pretty much dictate anything church-related in Finland. He chose to simply ignore the parts of the language that didn't fit, and in a few decades spoken Finnish shed the features that couldn't be represented in writing. The end result is probably the simplest writing system anyone anywhere uses as their first language.