Of course, you can say Minä pitää sinä leaving all the words in their basic form, and surprisingly the Finns will understand you (provided your body language is appropriate). In other words Finnish is different. Create your own unique website with customizable templates. How much home work did you have? Actually it's not! Finnish is famous for being a tonal language meaning the word it is, depends on how the other speaker says the world. Whether or not you’ve mastered Finnish, dive with us into its different dialects, as deep as you dare. Log in sign up. But if you are a perfectionist or otherwise take your studies seriously, you will want to know how a Finn says it. Most teachers give students some homework but many students do not do it. It all starts in your mind. So yeah, it's difficult. Finnish literature is going further than ever. Finnish is famous for being an extremely difficult language, one of the hardest languages to learn in the world. If you type "Learn Finnish" or "Finnish language" into a search engine, usually you'll see loads of stuff about Finnish being the world's second or third most difficult language, and there is a … In fact, Finnish is a very logical language, as many students who have methodologically studied it admit. Up to the challenge of learning Finnish? The grammar is insanely complicated and at least in Finnish people speak Finnish in a very slangy way and what you learn in school is written Finnish but people just do not speak that way. But wri… How many classes did you have with teacher every week? Finnish does not have to be a difficult language. Why learn Finnish. With its inflectional stems and 15 grammatical cases, Finnish is often considered to be an especially challenging language to learn, but this fearsome reputation in itself may be causing an even bigger problem for new learners. For a foreigner, however, it is always best to start with the standard form of the language. Mandarin Chinese is challenging for a number of reasons. Finnish Barry Farber, the author of “How to Learn any Language” and a polyglot many times over, says that Finnish is one of the hardest languages for him to learn. Like most languages, you can learn to speak Finnish with time, effort, and dedication. Kunsi Palaa is one of the most famous Finnish phrases, mostly a it has 9 separate meanings! For Chinese speakers like us, we would find learning Japanese, Korean much easier. Without Germanic or Latin influence, Finnish vocabulary is completely alien to English speakers. What is your French like now? It is quite subjective to say which is the most difficult language(s) to learn in the world. Finnish speakers around the world: 5.4 million native speakers Writing system: Latin (Finnish alphabet) Why is Finnish hard to learn? Maybe that reputation is deserved, but there are a couple of things that certainly don’t make Finnish as hard as people think it is. Is it just to learn a little conversational Finnish and to keep the students amused for two hours per week? Finnish. Finnish has a reputation for being a tricky language to learn, and with good reason. 1.9K views View 6 Upvoters Finnish has a reputation of being very hard. Follow the facebook page for regular updates and lessons, Verbityypit ja preesens / Verb types and the present tense, Pluskvamperfekti / The Past-perfect tense, Komparatiivi ja Superlatiivi / The Comparative and Superlative, Monikon partitiivi / The Plural Partitive, Verbien "minen" substantiivimuoto / The Noun Form of a Verb, 1. infinitiivi pitkä muoto / 1st Infinitive: long form, Essiivi ja translatiivi / The Essive and the Translative, Aktiivin 1. partisiippi / The Active 1st Participle, Aktiivin 2. partisiippi / The Active 2nd Participle, Passiivin 1. partisiippi / The Passive 1st Participle, Passiivin 2. partisiippi / The Passive 2nd Participle, Agenttipartisiippi / The Agent Participle, Top 5 Finnish Textbooks for Teaching Yourself with, The 10 Best Words/Phrases in the Finnish Language, 5 Things That You Should Prepare For When Moving To Finland. Press J to jump to the feed. Number of native speakers: 260 million Grammatical concepts: 3/5 Language family: 3/5 Sounds and tones: 3/5 Writing system: 4/5 Cultural distance: 3/5 Language resources: 1/5 Hindi is highly phonetic, which means it’s spelled the way it sounds – score! The biggest problem is where to start. Just try your best and ask people to correct you, learning takes time but can be really rewarding. Farsi comes from the Indo-Iranian branch of languages, so speakers of Dari (Afghanistan) already speak Farsi, too. If you want to learn Finnish then I suggest you read this article first. Practice often using smart techniques, and practice it on fluent speakers as often as possible. The answer to this depends on the aim of the language course. In addition to the usual challenges that come with learning any language from scratch, people studying Mandarin must also memorize thousands of special characters, unlike anything seen in Latin-based languages. 1. Finnish often expresses ideas very differently from the ways of the more commonly studied European languages. This is based on my own experience of studying and teaching Finnish. For people who are learning or want to learn the Finnish language. In a very close election, the Social Democratic Party won the most seats in Parliament – but only just. Interestingly, the hardest language to learn is also the most widely spoken native language in the world. Before being part of the Foreign Correspondents’ Programme (FCP), I knew how challenging the mastery of the language is. For these reasons, the problem facing the teacher of Finnish is to decide in which order grammar and vocabulary should be taught and how thoroughly they should be learnt. But this does not make it more difficult than other languages. There are three official languages in Finland – Finnish, Swedish, and Sami – but Finnish is the mother tongue of almost 90 per cent of the population. How easily can a foreigner learn a language like this? Join our tour of prose, poetry and publishing (and Finland-Swedish books). Remember how you learnt (or failed to learn) French at school. I don't consider myself a novice at languages, having learned English, Mandarin and and German, but Finnish is the next level. Now I would like to tell you how you can make it even easier, or rather, how you can not make it difficult for yourself. Finnish grammar can be learnt logically. Besides that, however, Hindi has some challenging differences in terms of grammar, pronunciation and writing. I'd like to explain to you why Finnish can actually be very easy to learn. Arabic speakers would encounter fall less difficulty with Farsi than native English speaker, and the same hold true for Hebrew. I think that it can be hard to learn, but Finnish doesn’t is that difficult, what many of you guys think. Because Finnish is a very synthetic language. Get to know the Finns with our abbreviated but thorough guide – a starter kit for keeping up with the Finnish culture. The FSI estimates that it would take 44 weeks or 1100 hours to before Finnish rolls off the tongue. Hi! The level of difficulty you're likely to face depends on a couple of factors. Students of Finnish have to learn to use multiple modifiers to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, as well as numerals, depending on their roles in the sentence. You’ll get a closer look at the essence of the language. The Finnish language can “boast” an extremely complicated grammar structure with numerous derivative suffixes, which makes it especially difficult to learn. It does not have a lot of common points with French, my mother tongue, or English, my second language. In fact, Finnish is a very logical language, as many students who have methodologically studied it admit. Estonia and Hungary are almost, or completely as hard as Finnish, to learn. Thanks for your comment, Amanda. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. But I do agree that Chinese language(s) are the most difficult to learn languages and master in the world. According to a freshly-released list Finnish is among the group of languages the FSI considers to be the most difficult for English speakers to learn. Many ask "Is Finnish difficult to learn or not?" To start with, Finnish is a very demanding language, not least for a teacher and an author of a Finnish textbook. (: Reply. By Hannele Branch, lecturer in Finnish, University of London. User account menu • They weren't kidding when they said that Finnish is a difficult language to learn. Mandarin is a language within the Chinese language group and is actually the most spoken language in the world. How many years did you spend on it? Linguists recognise a phenomenon called Sprachbund. 2. If a young Finnish man were bold enough to express such feelings in words, he would be more likely to say something like: Mä tykkään susta. They change, and, therefore, it is often impossible to give a strict rule for a particular grammatical point. In reality it is not very likely that a Finn today would say: Minä pidän sinusta. Colloquial Finnish often differs markedly from the standard language. In other words Finnish is different. Close • Posted by 48 minutes ago. To understand the kind of complexities that Finnish presents to the beginner, let us examine the Finnish equivalent of the simple English sentence: I like you. For this article, we ask friends and colleagues what textbooks they’re using, and request tips on mastering Finnish. Many native speakers might hesitate, for example, between the imperfect forms kielsi and kielti, meaning “he forbade”. I don't know about how hard it is to learn, but I just wanted to pass on a little bit of trivia. Finnish is difficult because 1) the vocabulary is in no way related to the other languages of European origin, for example English origin Spanish origen Italian origine Portuguese origem French origine Swedish ursprung Norwegian opprinnelse Pronouncing is different from English - often difficult for English speakers. Because of the same environment, a common history, culture and contacts, Scandinavian languages, German and Finnish share some features (perhaps mostly in vocabulary) which bind them together and accordingly make it easier for people who know these languages to understand some features of Finnish. Produced by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Department for Communications © 1995 - 2021, A next-level Finnish language experience: Discovering dialects, Finnish contemporary literature: A wealth of voices, Finnish parliamentary elections: Record number of women winners, Produced by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Department for Communications © 1995 - 2021. how a Finnish verb is conjugated (the personal endings). Nouns have 15 different cases, while in English, they have only three: subjective, objective, possessive. What makes Finnish so hard to learn for English speaker is translation and pronunciation. Published by the Finland Promotion Board First, Hindi uses an SOV (subject object verb) word order and has new sounds for English speakers, including dhaand hka. Finnish (endonym: suomi or suomen kieli [ˈsuo̯meŋ ˈkie̯li]) is a Uralic language of the Finnic branch spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. I often hear about different forms and cases and how they make learning finnish hard, but you don't have to be perfect. Thanks to it being a tonal language, every sound in Mandarin’s phonetic transcription system pinyin has four distinct pronunciations. It takes a real amount of hard work to translate from English, and even when that happens the result probably won’t be up to the mark. This year marks the centenary of Finnish independence. This all brings me back to the question: Is Finnish a difficult language? The language is in the Finno-Urgic language family, so it doesn't have any Latin or German influence to help you guess what something means. Saana says: 05/11/2017 at 13:21. Finnish often expresses ideas very differently from the ways of the more commonly studied European languages. Heck, even I think that finnish is hard language =D If you know some words and can put them together to form sentences that itself is really good start! Why? I dont really know about other native speakers, how hard it is to them, to learn Finnish. My advice, don’t try learn this language especially if you speak English. For an English speaker, however, mastering Mandarin is a tall order. Start by giving yourself a strong basis in the sounds and phrases of the language. First and foremost, the writing system is extremely difficult for English speakers (and anyone else) accustomed to the Latin alphabet. This simple sentence translates into Finnish as Minä pidän sinusta. People often assume that Finnish must be similar to the languages of neighbouring Sweden or Russia. But this does not make it more difficult than other languages. As the reader might already have guessed, my usual reply to the question is: it is not difficult but different. Unfortunately, the study of any foreign language requires work – and often very hard work. Long and short vowels, single and double consonants are separated and sound different -although- every letter always pronounced the same way and always every letter pronounced-in that respect not difficult to read . If you search for most difficult languages to learn, you will find Finnish in the top 10, or even top five. Depends what kind of Finnish you want to learn. Recent years have seen numerous new Finnish-as-a-second-language textbooks hit the market – so many that one article cannot claim to encompass … What you're comparing it to. Students often believe, or expect, that a language can be learnt by osmosis – just like that, in the classroom. In addition, their writing sy… There are so many words which all seem to look the same but which have different meanings and functions. Learning Finnish is far from impossible, and the number of non-Finns who can speak the language is constantly growing. "In Finland, you still occasionally come across the notion that the Finnish language is exceptionally difficult to learn. Furthermore, as I have already mentioned, languages are never static. ", I explained why Finnish is not as difficult to learn as the internet and Swedish people think it is. Finnish is in the Finno-Ugric language family, with Estonian and Hungarian. This kind of phenomenon exists, for example, in the Baltic region. The number of case forms for nouns is staggering: while German has four cases, Latin five, and Russian six, Finnish has no fewer than fifteen! In my previous article "Finnish: An easy language to learn? But this does not make it more difficult than other languages. This means that in a certain geographical area, languages which differ from each other typologically share other similarities which result from living in a similar environment. Or I don’t know, ’cause I’m from Finland and I speak Finnish so… whatever. Learning any language from scratch is difficult, and Finnish grammar is notoriously complex, with 15 cases that may or may not look totally different in their singular and plural forms. Finnish pronunciation isn’t far from English, but this language’s grammar certainly makes it one of the hardest languages. But let’s face another fact: Finnish is not only intimidating, it is hard. The English sentence is very easy for a foreigner to handle because you simply place one word after the other. This brings us to the reality that every language has a range of dialects and registers. Yet it’s up to you to judge whether Finnish (or any language, for that matter) is difficult to learn or not. Before you can produce this Finnish sentence, you have to know the following: It is quite a lot of grammar to handle such a simple sentence. Or is the learner going to be a translator or interpreter who has to understand all the nuances of the language? The greatest obstacle is the vocabulary, which requires memory; and the teacher cannot memorise for you. However, that is only the start of the problem. Read my suggestions carefully. But is Finnish more difficult than French or Spanish or Latin or German which you might have studied at school? What was your French like when you left the school? If you want it, then go get it! When people study Finnish abroad it is most often once a week for perhaps two hours at a time in an evening class. Both nouns and verbs have a large number of inflectional types, some of which are more frequent than others. One example of this is the change ti > si which started hundreds of years ago and is still continuing. Finnish is different. Finnish is unrelated to any other language in the area. Let’s have a word about the origins and idiosyncrasies of the Finnish language. Add that to the fact that Chinese is a language rich in homophones and full of idioms and aphorisms picked up … Sure, Finnish is difficult to learn. The point of this article is to give you the information I wish I had had before I started learning Finnish, because (even though I learned it very quickly) it would have made the whole process much easier, and there would have been much fewer moments of tearing my hair out and screaming curses to the gods. Despite these simplifying factors, Finnish is undoubtedly an exceedingly difficult language to learn. Tamil is a Dravidian language, which would be significantly less difficult to learn for speakers of languages from the same family. Spoken by about 6 million people, mostly in Finland and the autonomous republic of Karelia, Finnish is an Uralic language written with the Latin alphabet and whose writing is almost completely phonemic, which is a great help to beginners, whether they be Finnish or foreign. 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Swedish people think it is always best to start with the standard form of the language is difficult! Textbooks they’re using, and is finnish hard to learn it on fluent speakers as often as.... Very likely that a language can be learnt by osmosis – just that... Speakers like us, we ask friends and colleagues what textbooks they’re using, and good... The English sentence is very easy to learn or not you ’ ve mastered Finnish, I how... A perfectionist or otherwise take your studies seriously, you will want to learn Finnish for a foreigner however! Master in the Finno-Ugric language family system pinyin has four distinct pronunciations a very logical language, not for! Standard form of the language hours at a time in an evening class particular grammatical point take 44 or...