Finnish. Hard to learn, or learn hard

[Pursuivant]

Also, Finnish is monotone. Try learning thai or Vietnamese or Chinese, have a strep throat and you can end up getting horse manure in the bar instead of beer

[Sami-Is-Boss]

Yeah, and that. CHinese verbs are piss-easy though. It all balances out!

[opinto]

Opinto Sisu Jos suomi on vaikea oppia ,opiskella kova seuraa lähetystää yle puhe joka päivä yrittää Rexverbi ,elää ja nukkua suomi SamooraiSisoo
voit nähdä Japanin lapset opiskelevat yöllä
Mielenkiintoisesti Japanin pedagogit otetaan käyttöön Suomen mallin.SamooraiSisoo

[kalmisto]

Japanin lapset opiskelevat yöllä

Lapsiraukat ! ( http://www.eudict.com/?lang=fineng&word=lapsiraukat )

Mielenkiintoisesti Japanin pedagogit otetaan käyttöön Suomen mallin.

Huraaaaa !

The home page of Kazuto Matsumura ( a Japanese professor ): http://web.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~kmatsum/index.html

[Valinnan vapaus]

epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydelläänsäkäänköhän

Guys let's get this straight!

[Not even] with his lack of un-systematization...

I called the asylum, they have a bunk for me! Cya guys!

[cositagatita]

I dont know what my point was. I forgot it. Damn alcohol But im gona post this anyway. Im gona track this topic, if any questions raises, so i can answer them. Im sure there are some other finnish people in here if i forget this forum during sleep.

Nice one!

... if your mother tongue is far removed from the target language linguistically (not to mention the different writing systems). And let's not forget that people have different language skills.

I think it also has to do with the person's cognitive capacity in question. Some people can't "process" certain ideas, terms, imagery, etc, and thus setting their minds to visualize what the ideas are expressing and rationalizing them, is rather hard. In this case: no mental effort (or lack of it), no progress in the foreign language that's being studied.
A lot of people focus on understanding what they read or hear in a foreign language instead of being skilled in its correct phrasing and writing. That's good too if you are using the language as a tool to study/research something else.

[cositagatita]

Also, Finnish is monotone. Try learning thai or Vietnamese or Chinese, have a strep throat and you can end up getting horse manure in the bar instead of beer

Hahahaha, Vietnamese will submerge you to the underworld and have you come back as a... I lost it...
But it ain't a pretty trip, that I know!

[cositagatita]

Yeah, and that. CHinese verbs are piss-easy though. It all balances out!

Piss-in-your-pants-after-a-mad-weekend easy. Some aren't though; but everything you need for everyday small talk is piss-easy.
[I guess that would be a boy's piss... Girls still have to crouch...]

[cositagatita]

I can say a few sentences in Spanish... perhaps equivalent to doing a year of each at school

What sort of school is that?! Blimey! A year of a foreign language based on picking similarities with another (of the same family) language?
Well love, I doubt that! Besides, trying to make Spanish look easy, just makes some non-native speakers pronounce it much worse (they miss the plurals and gender changes and even the proper verbal conjugation). I have always thought that Spanish was easy to learn, especially because it's right under our noses in tasteless movies and pranks, but everyone said I was dead wrong, so...

[Anyway I really didn't mean to sound harsh... People are harsh in this forum, so I wanted to catch up... Maybe not my cup of tea though.]

[Rekkari]

Having learned English effortlessly (okay, starting English lessons when I was, like, zero years old may have helped a little), some still find it to be among the more difficult language to learn and speak (whether they know it or not):

(A) The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.
(B) On the other hand, the French eat a lot of fat but also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.
(C) The Mexicans eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.
(D) The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and, once again, suffer fewer heart attacks than the Americans.

What does this mean? Eat and drink what you like - it's speaking English that kills you.

[Upphew]

[I guess that would be a boy's piss... Girls still have to crouch...]

[PäähäniSattuu]

Also, Finnish is monotone. Try learning thai or Vietnamese or Chinese, have a strep throat and you can end up getting horse manure in the bar instead of beer

Well, double vowels and double consonants can be hard to realize for speakers of some languages. Also, English speakers cannot comfortably realize the post-vocalic glottal aproximant such as in kohta because English doesn't have it.

Finnish to me has been one of the easier languages to learn because I suck at memorization and Finnish is a very regular and predictable language. You typically don't need to memorize things like foot -> feet etc. Though why the plurals of auto and söpö aren't audot and sövöt eludes me though. That, and I've been forever bugged by that tappaa isn't kuolettaa, but apparently small kids in Finland use kuolettaa a lot.

[onkko]

That, and I've been forever bugged by that tappaa isn't kuolettaa, but apparently small kids in Finland use kuolettaa a lot.

To kill (tappaa) and to cause someone/something to be dead (kuolettaa) is totally different. More so when "kuolettaa" isnt used as killing but as in papers when someone decides to undo papers. Legally or not.

[PäähäniSattuu]

That, and I've been forever bugged by that tappaa isn't kuolettaa, but apparently small kids in Finland use kuolettaa a lot.

To kill (tappaa) and to cause someone/something to be dead (kuolettaa) is totally different. More so when "kuolettaa" isnt used as killing but as in papers when someone decides to undo papers. Legally or not.

Well, I know what it means, I'm just saying you'd expect kuolettaa to simply mean to kill.

There are a couple of other things which surprised me while learning Finnish:

- from things like 'viime viikonloppuna', 'takana' and 'kotona', I assumed that '-na' was just a general locative. But you can't say 'vieläkö olet assembly:na', you have to say assembly:ssa.
- from words like 'miksi', and 'siksi', as well as verbal forms like 'Mä tulen tänne syödäkseni', I assumed that the translative case could in general be used to indicate purpose and you could just answer 'Miks olet täällä?' say 'filmiks' to answer 'for a film', apparently not, you have to actually say 'Kun mä haluan katsoa filmiä'. But 'katsoakseni filmiä' is apparently fine.
- my favourite one: when I learnt the word käymälä for toilet, I assumed from that that käydä would mean something along the line of relieving oneself. Then I saw that 'Käy muumilaaksoon' themesong and I was a bit confused..

[AldenG]

That, and I've been forever bugged by that tappaa isn't kuolettaa, but apparently small kids in Finland use kuolettaa a lot.

To kill (tappaa) and to cause someone/something to be dead (kuolettaa) is totally different. More so when "kuolettaa" isnt used as killing but as in papers when someone decides to undo papers. Legally or not.

It's just a longer way of doing it.

But seriously, two things:

1) The definition you describe is nullify. Can kuolettaa really be used that way? I only know it as amortise, which is the gradual reduction of something like equity or debt over a specified period of time.

And 2) if you think about it, amortise also means to make dead, which is why it has 'mort' in the word. I could well imagine some Alan Rickman villain describing someone as a 'liability that needs to be amortized,' preferably in as gradual and painful a way as possible. It's not very different from the thinking that brought 'liquidate' into the underworld and the thriller genre. I've sometimes wondered if Ian Fleming invented that, but I suppose it probably predated his usage of it.