Help finding a job in Finland

[Adrian42]

Most foreigners immersed in a culture become reasonably fluent in German or French in a few years. With Finnish only a small minority do.

But this is not due to the Finnish language being that much more difficult.

It is very hard to survive in Germany or France without speaking the local language. Here in Finland nearly everyone speaks such a perfect English that you are not forced to learn Finnish when you don't need it in your job. Even for all official stuff (including things like unemployment benefits) most laws and all instructions and forms are available in Finnish, Swedish and English. That ain't true in Germany or France.

[cors187]

The rest remain at an embarrassing and frustrating level pretty much forever.

And ofcourse Alden didnt mention the 3rd group.

The ones that just dont care or dont have enough time or think that Finnish is likened to a 1983 Atari game console, its pretty much useless if your trying to link with a mac or pc
So now you know.This group isnt embarrassed about their 5 word vocabulary ,lol

[AldenG]

The rest remain at an embarrassing and frustrating level pretty much forever.

And ofcourse Alden didnt mention the 3rd group.

The ones that just dont care or dont have enough time or think that Finnish is likened to a 1983 Atari game console, its pretty much useless if your trying to link with a mac or pc
So now you know.This group isnt embarrassed about their 5 word vocabulary ,lol

To be more precise, I meant frustrating for the speaker and vicariously embarrassing for the listener/reader.

[Upphew]

The ones that just dont care or dont have enough time or think that Finnish is likened to a 1983 Atari game console, its pretty much useless if your trying to link with a mac or pc
So now you know.This group isnt embarrassed about their 5 word vocabulary ,lol

I keep wondering why Finns are considered rude when there are people thinking like that.

[cors187]

Americans are considered rude.
Fins are considered strange.

Its the first time i heard of calling a 1983 atari game console rude.
If you look at the atari its considered strange , outdated, complicated, restrictive.

But you know , if an American says what is generally correct then its not rude.
So maybe the Atari is rude by todays standards, because it presumes its current,updated,efficient.

We should have a poll about it.

[AldenG]

But this is not due to the Finnish language being that much more difficult.

I recollect from some experimentation I did decades ago that it takes more code, a considerable multiple in fact, to programmatically parse or generate Finnish compared to German. I can't speak to the relative difficulty of any languages for your brain, but lines of code must surely represent some kind of measure of sheer complexity.

I'll cede that the lexical ambiguity of some German noun/adjective endings can be as frustrating to a programmer as to a learner. But there are still a lot fewer combinations and overall basic sentence templates in German. At some point complexity must translate into difficulty.

OTOH I speak Finnish pretty well, at least have done, something I didn't really achieve with German, even if it did ease the way into fluency in Swedish (since lapsed).

[Adrian42]

But this is not due to the Finnish language being that much more difficult.

I recollect from some experimentation I did decades ago that it takes more code, a considerable multiple in fact, to programmatically parse or generate Finnish compared to German. I can't speak to the relative difficulty of any languages for your brain, but lines of code must surely represent some kind of measure of sheer complexity.

I'll cede that the lexical ambiguity of some German noun/adjective endings can be as frustrating to a programmer as to a learner. But there are still a lot fewer combinations and overall basic sentence templates in German. At some point complexity must translate into difficulty.

OTOH I speak Finnish pretty well, at least have done, something I didn't really achieve with German, even if it did ease the way into fluency in Swedish (since lapsed).

Different languages have different problems.

If you want to write something like a spell-checker or grammar checker then doing that for German is definitely much easier than for Finnish.

On the other hand there aren't the 3 grammatical genders in Finnish that makes learning German vocabulary often harder for foreigners.

If someone would claim that it would take 10% or 20% more time on average to reach the same level for Finnish than for German I might believe that, but when you look at how quickly foreigners become fluent in the local language the relevant difference is that it's no problem living in Finland when you speak only English (if you don't need Finnish in your job).

[Sami-Is-Boss]

German vocab more difficult than Finnish? I think not. Assuming we're talking about speakers of IE languages, the lack of cognates means you have to put much more effort in, especially with 'long' or scientific words which are often the same across Western European languages. It's a small step and not much effort (taking English as an example) to remember university -> universität, but university -> yliopisto is going to cause some serious problems. That's not even mentioning the vocab differences in everyday words as well.

[Adrian42]

German vocab more difficult than Finnish? I think not. Assuming we're talking about speakers of IE languages, the lack of cognates means you have to put much more effort in, especially with 'long' or scientific words which are often the same across Western European languages. It's a small step and not much effort (taking English as an example) to remember university -> universität, but university -> yliopisto is going to cause some serious problems. That's not even mentioning the vocab differences in everyday words as well.

But you must know whether the gender of Universität is male, female or neutral in German (it is female).
So even if you are able to guess the word from English, you still have to learn the gender it has in the German language.
Like for most foreigners it is not obvious that while Junge (boy) is male, Mädchen (girl) is neutral.
And it sounds really odd when you get the gender wrong in German.

[Pursuivant]

German grammar is totally perverse, not only do the nouns have gender, but they got sex-changing objects !!!!

Best way is to learn a thick accent where everything is just "döö" and you swallow the endings.

[Sami-Is-Boss]

Agree about the genders (as a native English speaker I don't need telling about how much of a pain they are), but they only cause you problems when speaking or writing if you don't know them. The completely unfamiliar words of Finnish are also going to clobber you when you're trying to read or speak because they'll stop you even guessing at the meaning

[Adrian42]

Agree about the genders (as a native English speaker I don't need telling about how much of a pain they are), but they only cause you problems when speaking or writing if you don't know them. The completely unfamiliar words of Finnish are also going to clobber you when you're trying to read or speak because they'll stop you even guessing at the meaning

At the point where guessing helps you already have to have some knowledge of the German language. English and German are not near enough to each other for allowing you to guess the contents of a German text without having learned German first.

And then there are pseudo-English words like Handy in German, or false friends ("public viewing" is now officially part of the German language, but not with the meaning people from the US expect).

I don't disagree with you that this might be a slight advantage when learning German compared to learning Finnish, but it doesn't make a substantial difference regarding the difficulty of learning either language.