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Finnish: most difficult language?

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jalcalde
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 Message 9 of 22
30 January 2006 at 8:29am | IP Logged 
Im not an expert, I can only say some words and understand a bit, but I don't think euskera is the most difficult language in Europe. I know some people who have learned it in one year (they communicate without problems), without doing specific efforts for it. It is, definitely, one of the strangest languages in Europe.
However, I do think that it heavily depends on your background. I mean, Russian can be really difficult for an Spaniard, but easy for a Polish. So I am not sure that everybody can reach an agreement of the (objectively) most difficult language, in Europe or wherever.
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Raistlin Majere
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 Message 10 of 22
30 January 2006 at 2:28pm | IP Logged 
I'd say euskera is a quite difficult language for two reasons:

1) I tried to learn it myself, but I stopped because of bad learning material (in fact it was so bad I got fed up with it and burned it). The declination system is several times more complex and difficult than that of Finnish, which is already quite hard.

2) It's a language isolate. It can't be easy for anybody in the sense that Italian is easy for a Spaniard or Dutch for an Englishman.
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jalcalde
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 Message 11 of 22
31 January 2006 at 4:21am | IP Logged 
I didn't say euskera was easy. However, I was questioning the idea that it could be the most difficult language in Europe.
Im unhappy to see that you have so many problems when trying to learn it. Me myself, I've found quite interesing and useful free on-line courses. Maybe here you can find some help:
http://www.euskalkultura.com/index.php?id=apr
Also in wikipedia there are some good links about it.
And here there are some characteristics of the language that, from my point of view, make the euskera easier than others:
a) The ortography is modern and every sound has a unique letter to represent it. Moreover, there are fewer sounds than in most of languages, even less than in Italian and Spanish.
b) Different from Romance languages, words have no gender, good news for English-speakers!
c) There are no prepositions...yes, as you know for this reason there are declinations and cases, but I mean, it could be worse.
d) There is no written accent, another head-ache for students of Romance languages.
e) It is true that verbs are quite difficult, but it is also true that the auxiliar verb is totally regular.

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Guanche
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 Message 12 of 22
01 February 2006 at 11:56am | IP Logged 
Euskera's grammar is simple and logical, but the language structure is so different from Spanish or English, that I think Euskera is rather difficult. However, I'd say it's probably easier than Hungarian or Finnish. After studying some Japanese and ancient Sumerian, I found that Euskera's grammar is very similar, so if you speak one of these languages, Euskera learning will be easier.
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patuco
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 Message 13 of 22
01 February 2006 at 12:17pm | IP Logged 
Guanche wrote:
...the language structure is so different from Spanish or English, that I think Euskera is rather difficult.

I once thought about learning Euskara, but for precisely this reason I didn't actually go through with it.


P.S.
Guanche wrote:
After studying some Japanese and ancient Sumerian...so if you speak one of these languages...

You might not find that many speakers of Sumerian (although I could be wrong).
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Camambert
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 Message 14 of 22
23 December 2008 at 4:59pm | IP Logged 
I think, Hungarian could be more difficult than Finnish. It has three more cases at least (18 vs. 15 in Finnish) :-p
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Chung
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 Message 15 of 22
23 December 2008 at 5:27pm | IP Logged 
In my uneducated opinion, I'd think that Estonian is slightly harder than Finnish.

Learning Hungarian was much easier for me when compared to what I'm going through with Estonian (and most likely it'll be the same for Finnish whenever I get around to it). Constructing or using Hungarian cases was relatively straightforward compared to how I have to do it in Estonian (the same would almost certainly hold true for Finnish, whenever I'll get around to it).

What's more the number of cases wouldn't necessarily mean more overall difficulty. I'm not sure if someone could say that Bulgarian is easier than Russian since the former has effectively no cases whereas the latter has at least 6 cases (up to 8 depending on whom you talk to). There's more to difficulty in language learning than cases.
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gorkem_turkish
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 Message 16 of 22
24 December 2008 at 4:13am | IP Logged 
Martien wrote:
Somewhere in this forum (unfortunately I cannot find back the exact message) I saw a statement that Finnish could be considered as the most difficult language in Europe.


Hencke wrote:
I think you must have seen that in the "Finnish" language description page, not in a thread in the forum.


http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/finnish.htm l

Martien wrote:
I must add that I speak Turkish fairly well so Finnish could be less overwhelming for me then for others who don't know any of these agglutinative languages.


Makes sense. as a turkish person I really admire my language a lot. The grammar is amazing and extremely well-organized since it is a very new language with foundation of turkish republic and leaving arabic letters behind us. Consequently, if Finish affixes are also well organized like Turkish, i may also consider it to study. Maybe you can tell what you think.




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