| Introduction |
| Usefulness | A huge proportion of Finnish
speakers have at least basic English, and many of them have excellent
English. All in all, I couldn't say Finnish is "'useful" but
if you are spending significant time in Finland, it will be
worthwhile. |
| Beauty | With soft consonants and a
fine range of vowels, Finnish can be a nicely melodic language.
Unfortunately, many speakers, especially men, tend to lapse into a
monotone. |
| Chic
factor | Probably none ! Even in
Finland, the locals find it so hard to believe you speak their
language that they will quickly switch to English unless you
persevere. |
| Speakers | Around 5 million people in
Finland and a few tens of thousand in the rest of the world |
| Countries | Finland ! You can get by
pretty well with it in Estonia too... |
| Regional
Variations | The variations are confined to
the spoken language. There are some quite marked variations within
Finland, but the standard version will get you round everywhere. The
written language is uniform. |
| Travel | Finland is a beautiful country
- spacious, clean, and civilised. The lakes and forests are wonderful.
The winters are cold, but offer excellent winter-sports - or just
snowman-building! |
| Culture | Not much Finnish culture has
made it to the rest of the world. One example if Väinö Linna's novel
"The Unknown Soldier". Finland's best know cultural exports
- Sibelius and Tove Janssen (Muumins) - were/are Swedish speakers ! |
| m |
| Difficulty |
| Phonemes | The only unusual sound for
English speakers is the 'y' which is a 'front-u', the same as 'u' in
French. Finish lacks the 'j' 'ch' and 'sh' sounds, and only words very
recently borrwed from (usually) English have more than one consonant
at the beginning. 'r' is rolled, so much easier than French ! No
European language speakers should have any real difficulty. One common
problem for English speakers is that the difference between single and
double letters is crucial: tuli=fire/he came; tulli=customs (as in
'anything to declare'); tuuli=wind; tule=come here !; tullee= he's
probably coming; tuulee=it's windy |
| Syntax | This is where Finnish has a
rather fearsome reputation with its 14 noun cases. However, 2 of these
are never used in speech, 6 of them correspond to prepositions in
other languages (in, on, etc.) This leaves 6, which is the same number
as Latin, and the real win is that the endings for all 14 are exactly
the same for all nouns, so none of this "declensions" stuff,
and in singular and plural. Verbs are also well behaved with only
about 4 irregular ones, and the 4 (yes, just 4) tenses behave very
much like English. |
| Vocabulary | A minus point here as the lack
of Indo-European links makes most vocab. completely alien for IE
speakers. Even the words borrowed from (usually) Swedish or Russian
are so well disguised that they might as well be native Finno-Ugric. |
| Ortograph | Completely phonetic, but the
difference between single and double letters is crucial, as mentioned
above. |
| Overall
difficulty | FXM rates this language as *****,
that is, very difficult to learn, as this it the reputation this
language has among language learners. However, Stephen Day writes that
"In my experience as an English speaker, somewhere between French
and German. 2.5*D Easy for Estonians, probably more difficult for
people whose native languages don't inflect at all." |
| Time
needed | About the same as German for
non-Dutch speakers. |
| m |
| Learning
material |
| Books
and tapes | None at the present time. |
| Schools | I can offer no advice on this
at this time. |
Links
| Submit yours. |
