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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 Englis

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.

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.