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> One issue though is that if you want to apply citizenship, you need to show you have adequate skills in either Finnish or Swedish (both are official languages

> One issue though is that if you want to apply citizenship, you need to show you have adequate skills in either Finnish or Swedish (both are official languages). Why is that an issue? It seems reasonable to me if you want to have citizenship. But you can surely live a successful life in Finland as a foreign national, no?

Hamuko 5y ago
Finnish is the issue since it's fucking hard to learn. Learning Swedish isn't that bad if you're a native English speaker. "In a shop" - "i en butik", there's quite a bit of similarity between the languages. But Finnish is a whole another ballgame - "kaupassa" ("kauppa" being "a shop"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_grammar#Noun_forms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_grammar#Noun_forms
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > But Finnish is a whole another ballgame - "kaupassa" ("kauppa" being "a shop"). Not all that outlandish either -- a cognate of Swedish köpa and German kaufen.
  - soundnote 5y ago
    He doesn't mean the vocabulary. Swedish is structurally very similar to English, and both contain lots of Germanic words. The difficulty with Finnish for English-speaking foreigners is that Finnish is an agglutinative language, while English is an analytical one. That is, English mostly uses helper words to adjust word meaning, while Finnish appends modifiers like lego blocks. It also has less Germanic and Latin loans than Swedish does.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      Ah, that. But that shouldn't be all that difficult either: "OK, so I don't put 'in the' before the word, but '-ssa' after it, without a space". Use that rule, and that whole "problem" is fixed. Compared to English, Finnish is still super-easy to learn in at least one respect I think is much more important for ease of learning: No exceptions. With most languages, you have to learn a bunch of regular patterns, and then all the exceptions from those. Finnish isn't like that -- just learn the rules, and you're good to go. No exceptions to learn.
      - Hamuko 5y ago
        The problem is in that there's so many rules to learn. KOTUS has 51 declension types for Finnish nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and numerals. And if I want to say "It was on sale in our store as well", I have to conjugate the same "kauppa" word multiple times: "Se oli alennuksessa meidän kaupassammekin" (kauppa [store] -> kaupassa [in a store] -> kaupassamme [in our store] -> kaupassammekin [in our store as well]). Foreigners would probably also not be too appreciate of the "no exceptions" part when they discover that "teen", "teet", "tekee", "tekevät", "tehdään", "tein", "teki", "tehtiin" and "tehnyt" are all various inflections of the same "tehdä" (to do) verb. We also have the good ol' word salads in the form of compound words. Germans may have the Doppelkupplungsgetriebe, but we have the Kaksoiskytkinvaihteisto.

Hamuko 5y ago

Finnish is the issue since it's fucking hard to learn. Learning Swedish isn't that bad if you're a native English speaker. "In a shop" - "i en butik", there's quite a bit of similarity between the languages. But Finnish is a whole another ballgame - "kaupassa" ("kauppa" being "a shop"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_grammar#Noun_forms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_grammar#Noun_forms

CRConrad 5y ago
> But Finnish is a whole another ballgame - "kaupassa" ("kauppa" being "a shop"). Not all that outlandish either -- a cognate of Swedish köpa and German kaufen.
- soundnote 5y ago
  He doesn't mean the vocabulary. Swedish is structurally very similar to English, and both contain lots of Germanic words. The difficulty with Finnish for English-speaking foreigners is that Finnish is an agglutinative language, while English is an analytical one. That is, English mostly uses helper words to adjust word meaning, while Finnish appends modifiers like lego blocks. It also has less Germanic and Latin loans than Swedish does.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    Ah, that. But that shouldn't be all that difficult either: "OK, so I don't put 'in the' before the word, but '-ssa' after it, without a space". Use that rule, and that whole "problem" is fixed. Compared to English, Finnish is still super-easy to learn in at least one respect I think is much more important for ease of learning: No exceptions. With most languages, you have to learn a bunch of regular patterns, and then all the exceptions from those. Finnish isn't like that -- just learn the rules, and you're good to go. No exceptions to learn.
    - Hamuko 5y ago
      The problem is in that there's so many rules to learn. KOTUS has 51 declension types for Finnish nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and numerals. And if I want to say "It was on sale in our store as well", I have to conjugate the same "kauppa" word multiple times: "Se oli alennuksessa meidän kaupassammekin" (kauppa [store] -> kaupassa [in a store] -> kaupassamme [in our store] -> kaupassammekin [in our store as well]). Foreigners would probably also not be too appreciate of the "no exceptions" part when they discover that "teen", "teet", "tekee", "tekevät", "tehdään", "tein", "teki", "tehtiin" and "tehnyt" are all various inflections of the same "tehdä" (to do) verb. We also have the good ol' word salads in the form of compound words. Germans may have the Doppelkupplungsgetriebe, but we have the Kaksoiskytkinvaihteisto.