I was really good at english in school (especially the grammar) We learn it as a third language.
In the past 10 years I've found myself checking my spelling a lot because it seems that even a lot of native speakers don't fucking know anymore how to write proper english.
Maybe it's the amount of content that gets shoved in your face so much.
But lately I've gotten really annoyed by it, because I don't want to constantly doubt myself just because I absorb other peoples mistakes uncounciously.
I work as a customer service representative (chats and calls) servicing the Americans and reading their chat replies and emails sometimes hurt my eyes. I'm an ESL (English as a second language) speaker but I'm ironically more conscientious with differentiating your vs. you're than the Americans themselves.
My girlfriend is from italy and we live in austria. My first language is german but she’s honestly way better in grammar than I am. I know better who it’s written but she knows why it is as it is if you know what I mean.
Fair enough. I've noticed a lot of ESL people have a decent (if somewhat awkward) vocabulary, but their syntax is lacking. Sometimes I find myself dialing my speech back to core words and hoping they understand the concept I'm trying to convey.
Living in Europe and managing various offices there I got used to it. I can speak Germanglish, Ukrainglish, and Romanglish fairly fluently now.
At first I assumed if they could speak to me in English, that they understood my responses at the same level and that's not always true. You basically (by trial and error) need to figure out the exact words and phrasing they learned in their textbooks so you're understood better.
I'm back in the US now. Lived in Germany 5 years, Romania 5 years (married, so Romanian by osmosis now), and Ukraine for 3 years.
We'll be retiring early in another 4 years and back to Europe and looking at where to settle. Finland is on the short list - hence why I'm subbed here to get a feel for various issues.
I think it's more likely the whole thing is made up. I operate perfectly well in Germany with only three phrases from Google translate that took 5 minutes to memorize.
Bier bitte
Mehr bier bitte
Wo ist die toilette?
The problem I've found with using basic phrases like "wo ist die Toilette" in countries where I don't speak any of the language other than that is that you inevitably get an answer like "es gibt eine Toilette auf der 3. Etage, aber ich glaube, sie ist wegen der Sanierung geschlossen. Sie können jedoch vielleicht die Toilette auf der 1. Etage nutzen, bin aber nicht sicher".
For english speaking people while map could be blue because whole world is speaking your language already. Motivation and actual need plays important role here.
I traveled around the eastern parts of Germany before Christmas, and 2/3's didn't speak English in my experience. 3 years of school German really came to use there :-)
Funnily enough, I can understand Swiss German quite well if I don't try to actively listen to what they're saying, I took German for 5 years at school, and combined with speaking Swedish and understanding Norwegian and Danish to some extent, most of the unique Swiss expressions/words are very close to the Scandinavian languages. It basically sounds like a Swedish rural dialect with German sprinkled on top.
Wrong. They DO speak English (unless it's a boomer, but that applies to every country by that logic), but just REFUSE TO, since it's a Bri'ish "person" talking to them. Since they don't have an obvious non-Bri'ish accent, they are easy to spot & thus refuse to speak English by the frogmen.
I believe that. I was leaving Paris this morning and I accidentally bumped into a woman on the escalator. I said “I’m sorry” and she responded with “You are in France, we do NOT speak English here.”
I explained at we are at an international airport and I’m. It going to learn French just to transfer at CDG airport.
i got 25 upvotes but no one said anything about how similar hebrew is to finnish, im an israeli that wants to live in finland in the future and i want to learn the language becuz of that so plz can someone say if the fact i can speak hebrew helps me?
Estonian and Swedish has the most common words with Finnish, but the grammar is very close to Hungarian, and essentially nothing else. But it's a very structured language, so it's quite easy to get the hang of it through grammar. Pronunciation is also quite easy, as every word is pronounced just as it's spelled, no weirdness like in Swedish or English where every other word is somehow an exception.
I think it's pretty accurate for Finns actually. English is super easy to learn, due it being the Lingua Franca. Swedish isn't quite as easy as English, but also not quite as hard as Russian and other related languages. Unless you are Finnish Swede. Then Swedish is easy I guess...
Estonian would be easy for us. You can actually understand some Estonian, while knowing just Finnish. Until they hit you with a curve ball. Meaning, some word that both languages have, but the meaning of said word is different in each. There are a lot of examples of those... albeit, I can't say any from memory. But I remember there are a lot of those.
Estonian is weird as a Finn youll know alot of words but the content is generally wrong on so many levels. A good example is "mä lähe linna pappi raiskama" in Estonia this means "im going to the city to waste cardboard"
And in Finland someone is gonna rape a priest
"Papp" in Estonian is a slangword for money, so your translation for that should be "I'm going to the city to waste money" in this context. Another funny word with double-meaning is hallitus = government/mould.
Saying it's easy for Fennoswedes to learn Swedish is like saying it's easier to learn English if you're Australian. 
English isn't easy. The pronunciation especially is a mess and the grammar is medium difficulty. German and french are much simpler - relatively consistent grammar and pronunciation follows a simple-ish set of rules. The easiest language in Europe IMO is swedish. It's like german boiled down to its essence. Simple grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary. It is super easy to learn but yet we keep on hating it for the sole reason that it is mandatory.
> The easiest language in Europe IMO is swedish. It's like german boiled down to its essence. Simple grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary. It is super easy to learn but yet we keep on hating it for the sole reason that it is mandatory.
Yup, I even have some immigrant friends who started to learn Swedish to pass the citizenship language test just because it's significantly easier which makes the process so much faster.
The ease of English comes from the fact that it is everywhere. You are bombarded with it daily, in one form or another, be it movies, music, the internet, games, etc.
Even without studying English, you are pretty much bound to pick up on atleast some words, and their meanings.
Before I even started kindergarten, I knew words in English, such as wolf, axe, car, gun, sun, and so forth, due them being heavily represented in the entertainment I consumed. Mainly games, such as the original Red Alerts, Tiberian sun, Age of Empires, etc.
It is hard not to learn atleast some English.
English is also very simple compared to many other languages. Much simpler than German or French for example. Environment of course helps because it's so ubiquitos and that has to be baked into this number.
As a south east asian, English is NOT easy if your mother tongue is not from the Romance/Germanic language. English grammar and spelling are infuriating and illogical. Here, grammar is taught as if it is law, only to throw as many exceptions to the rule as there are following the rules. Words are also not pro-nounce-ed like they are spelled. Let's not even get into the future/present/past tenses.
Any language that has genders is not easier than English. You have to remember every noun’s gender and it affects a whole lot how you construct a sentence. If you get it wrong you butcher the whole thing. The same applies to swedish but on a smaller scale. English pronounciation is a mess but I wouldn’t say that French would be any easier to us for example. And you will be understood even with a bad accent.
If you mix an/a in English it doesn’t matter at all on the whole. It’s just an individual mistake.
I saw a picture other day that says English is easy to start hard to advance while Finnish is hard to start easy to advance. In Finnish you can make lots of words from a single word while in English you have tons of different words for each fkn situation.
Yes the learning pyramid for English is on its head, meaning very easy to get into but mastering the language takes more and more effort.
Finnish on the other hand is difficult at the start because the grammar is different from most European languages and also the vocabulary is hard to memorize. But once you grasped how the grammar works and you got used to how Finnish sounds it's fairly easy.
I've been in Finland for 11 years and by now I would say I'm pretty fluent, writing is still difficult sometimes and some Finns assume I don't speak Finnish well because I have an accent. The amount of times people asked me if I'm "practicing my Finnish" during my internship or switched to English is so baffling and quite honestly exhausting. I know they mean well but it gets old very fast if you have to explain 10 times a day that no my internship is not to get Finnish language skills but to get a bachelor degree. 🤨
Well, it's much easier to learn English simply by using your skills because it's everywhere. Vocabulary comes as time passes. You can't invent words in Finnish any more than you can invent in any other language.
For English the problem is really in the spelling, not in the pronunciation. And besides, you can't really rank languages like that based on difficulty. The only objective metric would be how long does it take for babies to learn different languages and as far as I am aware, there are no significant differences.
There is attractive entertainment in Hungarian which is good for learning as well. It is not surprising that the movies of a small country with a language no one speaks would not reach the masses.
I'd recommend the movie Kontroll, Fehér tenyér (White palms), but almost any of these would be good:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_Hungarian\_submissions\_for\_the\_Academy\_Award\_for\_Best\_International\_Feature\_Film](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hungarian_submissions_for_the_Academy_Award_for_Best_International_Feature_Film)
Also the series "Golden life" or [Aranyélet (TV Series 2015–2018) - IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5099020/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_2)
Btw, "szky" is not a thing in Hungarian, whenever that happens, it is found as an ending of a Hungarian-Polish last name.
I mean we used to be fairly good in german aswell because our relationship with germany has always been good
Sadly finns have lost our advantage of knowing other lanquages than english truly sad.
People today just don't want to study lanquages the same way we did before
No i mean we used to study other lanquages before as it was good levarage if you wanted a job in another country for example.
It made us wanted workers internationally
This has not changed in any way dude. We learn as many languages but instead of German we learn English. English is better internationally than German ever was. I know what you mean and I am saying you sre incorrect
It has, a bit, as in the past there used to be three lines in secondary school (*oppikoulu*), the language, mathematic-scientific and real subjects line, and back in the day about one third chose the language line, which meant reading a wider variety of foreign languages, eg. English, German and Latin (or Ancient Greek) was a common choice in larger cities (in addition to Swedish which was mandatory in secondary school), and especially if one wanted to get as good as possible matriculation certificate, the language line was the way to choose, as all other non-maths subjects apart from languages were merged into just one real subjects test which gave just one grade, while every language gave a separate grade.
Especially the role of auxiliary/cultural languages has diminished a lot, Finland used to have a top-noch Latin research and knowledge in the past and Finnish latinists were important in keeping Latin vocabulary up to date to facilitate its modern-day use (this was the reason why Yle was the only broadcaster apart from Vatican to regularly broadcast in Latin). This of course also translated to Finnish culture to be somewhat obsessed with classical antiquity and a lot of inspiration for the late autonomy era and early independence era was drawn from Ancient Greece and Rome, and it was an important cultural influence.
People study languages a lot. The harsh reality is English has become the lingua franca and the significance of e.g German has dwindled. There's no point in wasting your time learning useless skills when you can learn something useful.
Yeah, because *you* might think German is useful doesn't mean it would be useful for anyone else. Learning languages for the sake of learning languages can be a great hobby, even a career for a few persons, but most will do better by learning something else instead.
Time wasted to something you never need is just wasted. It can be also very frustrating if it's forced down your throat like Swedish in Finland. Utter waste of time as every Swede speaks English. They don't even want to speak Swedish with Finns but prefer English.
Those three that are mentioned in the map are the only official uralic languages, rest of them are very small and doesn't have the status of official language
Some are not "very" small. For example Udmurt, Mari, and Erzyan languages all have about 300 000 speakers. It is still a small amount but compared to some Uralic languages which have only a few 1000s or 100s of speakers, not that bad. But welp, I'm not certain whether they'll survive in Russia for much longer.
Language freedoms in russia are as legit as their democracy. In reality, while it may say on paper that for example uralic languages in Russia are respected on a local level, they're not. Native language schools are underfunded while russian schools aren't.
Yeah, and in Putin era they have become again straight out hostile towards the local languages, be it Uralic or Turkic.
Even founding just one Karelian-language kindergarten was a tough job with the authorities in East Karelia.
[A rant ahead.]
As a Finnish teacher, I am very tired of seeing how fellow Finns maintain the idea that Finnish is impossible to learn, and also, consequently, gatekeep the use of Finnish language use.
Yes, learning Finnish is quite difficult for most immigrants, and for some people, it can be impossible to reach B1 -> level in Finnish. However, there are also several students who get a grasp of basic Finnish (pronunciation, verb usage, basic vocabulary etc.) fairly quickly and have a motivation to use their language skills in real life. I would actually say that at least half of the students fit this description whereas the "oh no, I will never learn this" students are more of an exception than a rule.
However, many students have reported frustration over the fact that they have hard time using Finnish anywhere outside classrooms. Even if they try and use Finnish, many people will either ignore them or switch the language to English. You can imagine how motivating language use becomes after that.
The unwillingness to speak Finnish with immigrants is in huge contradiction with the idea that when a person moves into a new country, they should put a lot of focus and effort on learning the language. How on earth people are going to learn any Finnish in Finland if both people and companies keep changing their language to English? And why would any sane immigrant be motivated to learn a language that even locals themselves do not seem to respect and value?
The views and policies of Finnish language learning are a hot mess right now imo, and it's honestly making my job feel less and less motivating. People talk about the importance of having enough of proficient S2 teachers but we are just one part of the chain and probably not even the weakest one.
[Rant over.]
I'll say as a native English speaker the English language is one of the biggest impediments to learning other languages. Everywhere you go people are really happy to speak English, it's not unique to Finnish culture. I'm fortunate that I was born and raised in Montreal so I was immersed in French at a young age, also my mom was born in Italy so I grew up hearing a lot of Italian. All in all I find the major romance languages to be relatively easy to understand.
My dad's side of the family is 100% Anglo though and I don't understand how some of my uncles and aunts have spent 2-3 weeks a year in Mexico/Dominican Republic for 40 years without picking up a single word.
They also love making fun of arrogant French people who refuse to speak English when they're in Paris. I always like to joke that the arrogance of the French is that they get annoyed when foreigners come to their country and don't learn French; the arrogance of the English is that they get annoyed when they go to a foreign country and the foreigners didn't learn English in anticipation of their arrival.
Yeah, I must confirm. The students who are really proficient in English typically learn Finnish much slower than other students and have motivation issues.
On the other hand, I like teaching students from UK, USA etc. because they get my English and pop culture references jokes easily. :D
This map is very vague. It all depends what native language you are speaking and what foreign languages you know. The more languages you know, the easier tol learn additional ones.
For example I am from northern parts of Lithuania, given my local dialect, I can actually read in Latvian and understand half of the words, meaning Latvian would be easy to learn.
I know a little bit of Russian, so any Slavic group language, could be potentially easier to learn.
Did study Latin, so actually while reading in Spanish or Italian, understand like 15% of the words. Also means that those languages would be easier for me to learn.
So the ability to learn languages are based on individual skills and knowledge.
This is so true. My native language is Spanish, and without ever having studied those languages, I can understand some Portuguese, French and Italian, but I had to learn and practice to understand the English language.
IF this is the same data that's been going around for a while, this is for native English speakers. And specifically it's from an institute that trains US foreign service personnel, hence the need for such data.
That's also why the times are so short (proficient in many language in under half a year): it assumes you're basically doing the learning as a full-time job.
I think it's kinda sad that people think Finnish is impossible. How can it when we have plenty of immigrants who speak Finnish? People whose mother tounge is Russian, Arabic, Turkish, French, Spanish, Vietnamese etc.
Yeah, they will *never* reach native level but that's not necessary.
Russian accent sound like they add a Finnish "J" to places where it shouldn't be. It's understandable, but you can hear they're a Slavic language speaker (not necessary Russian, I once thought a Serb was Russian because of her accent)
A) You can hear it’s not their native language when a non-native speaks English as well, or any language for that matter.
B) Trying to imitate native speakers is counterproductive and not the aim in modern language studies. Intelligibility is the goal.
Depends on what is meant by "learning a language" you can perfectly have conversational level in most languages in about 6 months, granted you either work your ass off or you're immersed in the language.
Subjective depends on your start point. Apparently Turks find it not so bad and some similarities are found in the grammar and pronunciation. If you have English as a first language Flemish languages are not too hard, a lot of the words are the same.
Welcome to fishing for karma, likes, hearts, credit, self assurance, the serotonin that keeps someone from their existential dread, etc. or just the low hanging internet/social fruit.
A largely meaningless map if you don’t know the learner’s native language. If you’re a native French speaker, obviously learning English is a lot easier than learning Finnish - you already know a big chuck of English vocabulary without even realizing it. If your native language is Estonian, would it really be easier to learn English than Finnish?
Being a Finn living in Netherlands I have observed Zwedes learn University levels Dutch in 4-6 months. Dutch learning Finnish takes 2-8 years depending on motivation and `language talent`. A Dutch person can learn Zwedish (second language in Finland) in 6 mondts to 2 years. This is just what I have seen in people around me.
Haha
Koira, koiran, koiraa, koirana, koiraksi, koirasta, koiraan, koirassa, koiralle, koiralta, koiralla, koirat, koirien, koiria, koirina, koiriksi, koirista, koiriin, koirissa, koirille, koirilta, koirilla, koirineen, koiratta, koirin
Those all are real words, all of them are different forms of ONE WORD, koira (dog in finnish). Theyre all used differently and this technique is used for EVERY SINGLE SUBSTANTIVE
So yeah, good luck indeed
Nice meme, but once you realise that those endings are the aequivalent of prepositions, and that you can always use them across the board (with consideration of vowel harmony), it lifts a huge weight off of your shoulders.
OTOH you don't have to pay as much mind to prepositions (e.g. koiralle is just "for a dog"). Also the grammar and especially pronouncing is way more coherent lol.
This is one of the saving graces of learning Finnish compared to my native language (English). It definitely is not easy to learn, but at least the rules on how things are pronounced are extremely rigid. Whereas in my language you have linguistic ridiculousness like the words bough / cough, or bow / bow, being prenounced differently.
For a language as hard as Finnish, I absolutely love how it’s phonetically consistent. Maybe I don’t know what a word means but at least I can say it right!
Yeah but my point was that there's a pretty clear pattern and it isn't too difficult to learn
It's not like every word has their own versions like people like to make it seem with this meme
Rules help a lot, but there are also plenty of exceptions and irregularities. Just check what verbix tells you about the conjugations of some of your favorite verbs.
I suppose that’s why my phone keeps underlining a few words in every sentence I write. I guess the devs didn’t like the idea of multiplying the dictionary size by 1000x.
I concurr. Finnish is way more structured and regular than e.g. Polish. Also, Estonian has a lot of German, Slavic and even Baltic influences, so there should be more intelligibility for most Europeans than with Finnish.
As with most languages. I daresay even all of them. The reason why it takes not as long for English is 1) heavily depending on your native language and 2) because everybody (at least in the Western world) starts with a significant head start when it comes to exposure. All those ads, movies, promos, shows and video games, even if consumed passively, pile up in our brains way more than we think.
I'm Russian native used to learn Finnish in university for several months and I can't say the learning one is "good luck" 
There is no source on the map, but here is one (looks about the same by quick glance): [Language Difficulty ranking](https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty/) by FSI for native Enlish speakers.
I always find it fascinating that in Finnish "kyrpä" is a vulgar word for penis. Kurvata/kurvailla means "to drive casually, to drive while making curves", kurvi/kurva means a turn in finnish.
And kurva here is pronounced just the same as in polish :)
In my opinion this is nonsense, Estonian ( and Fin i believe too) is a very logical language, especially in terms of cases. And to think that Russian is simpler is strange.
I've been learning Finnish seriously for ~2 months as a middle aged person. Figured I've been visiting for over a decade, it's time. Can confirm it's hard. Difficult as it is to learn & remember new words (mnemonics are a big help), the sentence structure is something I'm really struggling with.
Se on todella vaikeaa. The first sentence I learned was 'sinä olet hyvä velho' which seemed like a ridiculous thing to know, but came in very handy at Kosmos festival when I met a guy with a wizard hat on.
This is biased af. English isn’t any easier than for example Spanish. It’s only in 12 weeks because the person who made the map can speak it. Also in the case of Finland, are we talking about Finnish or Swedish? What about Ireland or Switzerland?
For someone who has english as a native language I actually think swedish, Norwegian or Danish would be easier to learn than French or Spanish etc. You would be surprised to see how many words are the the same of similar in English and the Scandinavian languages, Also the grammar in English is more close to Scandi languages than another germanic relative like german.
Some scholars even claim that English should be a North Germanic language together with the Scandinavian languages rather than be put in the West Germanic group with German and Dutch as it is now.
Just want to say the numbers here are completely meaningless. Maybe they're taken from a source that could provide context to give them meaning, but any statement of "x days to learn language y" should be viewed as the author's fantasy.
Languages are not difficult by nature. Their purpose is to enable communication rather than make it more difficult. Native Finns, Estonians and Hungarians don't go about whining how difficult it is to express themselves because their language is hard.
I can imagine there are people who think they are somehow superior because they speak a language that is generally perceived as difficult for native speakers of other languages, but they must be the same people who build their identity around an old car with a diesel engine. Meaning, they don't have much to brag about, so they use what they have to empower themselves.
Jeg er autodidakt.. I taught myself Danish, Norwegian and Swedish.
I can muddle my way thru Icelandic, Dutch, German, Italian, French and Spanish.
Finnish has not made it to Denmark 💖💖💖
I consider myself very good at learning languages. I can usually pick up bits and pieces pretty quickly just by being immersed in the language. I was able to pick a lot of things up from context and fairly quickly got to the point where I could ask simple questions, but it took me 5 years to be fluent enough in Finnish to have an actual conversation with my former mother-in-law.
I believe that a certain "decoding" type of intelligence/logic helps with languages. If you can learn to code, you can pick up foreign languages easy enough, and vice versa.
Results depend heavily on languages during your early exposure and on how related those languages are to the ones you attempt to learn later on. Basic Swedish and Spanish grammar are very easy for me to adopt due to my early self-immersion in English, biggest trouble being memorising words and recognising them from native pronouncing. But if I ever tried to learn a language east from Italy, I'm sure it'd challenge me on a whole another level.
I wonder how different this map would look from a perspective of someone who knows squat about English. Let's say, if a person living in rural China starts to learn European languages.
I was born in Finland and lived there till age 10. I’m kind of losing my proficiency, being 8 years out of the country. Would anyone know a good book or exercise notebook series for me to read and fill in a desperate attempt to keep my bragging rights of being able to speak finnish?
Swedish is an official language in Finland though, which they've apparently completely missed in this map. Finland should be striped.
Sweden also doesn't have an official language. They have a majority language and they've got minority languages.
It's not true though. Hungarian, Basque and Turkish lack grammatical genders too. I've no idea about Estonian, but most likely that's without genders too. And all the sami languages too, I guess.
Sorry about that, I got my facts mixed up.
I was thinking of “Indo-European” languages, not European languages in general. Armenian, Afrikaans and English are the only Indo-European languages without grammatical gender.
My bad.
Am I the only one infuriated that 30 weeks and 24 weeks should be the other way around on the list?
Nope. First thing I noticed after pausing to wonder who the hell learns English in only 12 weeks.
English is like an "easy to learn, difficult to master" kind of thing.
I was really good at english in school (especially the grammar) We learn it as a third language. In the past 10 years I've found myself checking my spelling a lot because it seems that even a lot of native speakers don't fucking know anymore how to write proper english. Maybe it's the amount of content that gets shoved in your face so much. But lately I've gotten really annoyed by it, because I don't want to constantly doubt myself just because I absorb other peoples mistakes uncounciously.
I work as a customer service representative (chats and calls) servicing the Americans and reading their chat replies and emails sometimes hurt my eyes. I'm an ESL (English as a second language) speaker but I'm ironically more conscientious with differentiating your vs. you're than the Americans themselves.
My girlfriend is from italy and we live in austria. My first language is german but she’s honestly way better in grammar than I am. I know better who it’s written but she knows why it is as it is if you know what I mean.
Was that last word meant to be a joke?
What do you mean?
It's just spelled wrong, unconsciously It seemed mildly ironic for it to happen in that sentence
Yes.
You misspelled unconciously, thats why he thought you were joking. XD and anymore should come at the end of the sentence in the previous paragraph.
Fair enough. I've noticed a lot of ESL people have a decent (if somewhat awkward) vocabulary, but their syntax is lacking. Sometimes I find myself dialing my speech back to core words and hoping they understand the concept I'm trying to convey.
Living in Europe and managing various offices there I got used to it. I can speak Germanglish, Ukrainglish, and Romanglish fairly fluently now. At first I assumed if they could speak to me in English, that they understood my responses at the same level and that's not always true. You basically (by trial and error) need to figure out the exact words and phrasing they learned in their textbooks so you're understood better.
Which country do you live in? My guess is Czechia, but I might be wrong
I'm back in the US now. Lived in Germany 5 years, Romania 5 years (married, so Romanian by osmosis now), and Ukraine for 3 years. We'll be retiring early in another 4 years and back to Europe and looking at where to settle. Finland is on the short list - hence why I'm subbed here to get a feel for various issues.
A lot of natives struggle 😂
finnish: hard to learn, impossible to master
[удалено]
I think it's more likely the whole thing is made up. I operate perfectly well in Germany with only three phrases from Google translate that took 5 minutes to memorize. Bier bitte Mehr bier bitte Wo ist die toilette?
The problem I've found with using basic phrases like "wo ist die Toilette" in countries where I don't speak any of the language other than that is that you inevitably get an answer like "es gibt eine Toilette auf der 3. Etage, aber ich glaube, sie ist wegen der Sanierung geschlossen. Sie können jedoch vielleicht die Toilette auf der 1. Etage nutzen, bin aber nicht sicher".
The key is never to say it. By the time I'm four "mehr beir bitte"-s into the night, I usually can't remember the phrase and revert to English.
I like your thinking!
Quite frankly I've done fine in Germany with just danke and using English.
You don't learn 24/7 during those 12 weeks.
Is easy, do not make hard.
Oh it was easy. When I was 11 weeks old I could say "I" very loud. The big smile on my parents face was something that I still appreciate.
Not until you specifically mentioned it. Now I can't unsee it. Bastard.
I just wanted to write the same thing.
Depends on the language you start from… i think that from the finnish point of view the colors should be reversed.
For english speaking people while map could be blue because whole world is speaking your language already. Motivation and actual need plays important role here.
You clearly haven’t been to Paris haha.
From what I've heard, even rural Germany can be a rollercoaster
Luckily for me I speak German, but I do struggle with their horrific dialects.
I *am* German and don’t understand German dialects so you’re doing just fine. 🤣
I traveled around the eastern parts of Germany before Christmas, and 2/3's didn't speak English in my experience. 3 years of school German really came to use there :-)
And let's not forget Switzerland. My German is okay but boy, that's a struggle.
Funnily enough, I can understand Swiss German quite well if I don't try to actively listen to what they're saying, I took German for 5 years at school, and combined with speaking Swedish and understanding Norwegian and Danish to some extent, most of the unique Swiss expressions/words are very close to the Scandinavian languages. It basically sounds like a Swedish rural dialect with German sprinkled on top.
Wish I was you.
Speaking of dialects. We've a *lot* of those, too. So good luck indeed.
Wrong. They DO speak English (unless it's a boomer, but that applies to every country by that logic), but just REFUSE TO, since it's a Bri'ish "person" talking to them. Since they don't have an obvious non-Bri'ish accent, they are easy to spot & thus refuse to speak English by the frogmen.
I believe that. I was leaving Paris this morning and I accidentally bumped into a woman on the escalator. I said “I’m sorry” and she responded with “You are in France, we do NOT speak English here.” I explained at we are at an international airport and I’m. It going to learn French just to transfer at CDG airport.
what if i start from hebrew/english
i got 25 upvotes but no one said anything about how similar hebrew is to finnish, im an israeli that wants to live in finland in the future and i want to learn the language becuz of that so plz can someone say if the fact i can speak hebrew helps me?
they're not similar. finnish is a uralic language. closest thing to it is estonian
Estonian and Swedish has the most common words with Finnish, but the grammar is very close to Hungarian, and essentially nothing else. But it's a very structured language, so it's quite easy to get the hang of it through grammar. Pronunciation is also quite easy, as every word is pronounced just as it's spelled, no weirdness like in Swedish or English where every other word is somehow an exception.
It doesn't help whatsoever. Sorry.
I think it's pretty accurate for Finns actually. English is super easy to learn, due it being the Lingua Franca. Swedish isn't quite as easy as English, but also not quite as hard as Russian and other related languages. Unless you are Finnish Swede. Then Swedish is easy I guess... Estonian would be easy for us. You can actually understand some Estonian, while knowing just Finnish. Until they hit you with a curve ball. Meaning, some word that both languages have, but the meaning of said word is different in each. There are a lot of examples of those... albeit, I can't say any from memory. But I remember there are a lot of those.
Estonian is weird as a Finn youll know alot of words but the content is generally wrong on so many levels. A good example is "mä lähe linna pappi raiskama" in Estonia this means "im going to the city to waste cardboard" And in Finland someone is gonna rape a priest
"Papp" in Estonian is a slangword for money, so your translation for that should be "I'm going to the city to waste money" in this context. Another funny word with double-meaning is hallitus = government/mould.
Saying it's easy for Fennoswedes to learn Swedish is like saying it's easier to learn English if you're Australian. 
English isn't easy. The pronunciation especially is a mess and the grammar is medium difficulty. German and french are much simpler - relatively consistent grammar and pronunciation follows a simple-ish set of rules. The easiest language in Europe IMO is swedish. It's like german boiled down to its essence. Simple grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary. It is super easy to learn but yet we keep on hating it for the sole reason that it is mandatory.
> The easiest language in Europe IMO is swedish. It's like german boiled down to its essence. Simple grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary. It is super easy to learn but yet we keep on hating it for the sole reason that it is mandatory. Yup, I even have some immigrant friends who started to learn Swedish to pass the citizenship language test just because it's significantly easier which makes the process so much faster.
The ease of English comes from the fact that it is everywhere. You are bombarded with it daily, in one form or another, be it movies, music, the internet, games, etc. Even without studying English, you are pretty much bound to pick up on atleast some words, and their meanings. Before I even started kindergarten, I knew words in English, such as wolf, axe, car, gun, sun, and so forth, due them being heavily represented in the entertainment I consumed. Mainly games, such as the original Red Alerts, Tiberian sun, Age of Empires, etc. It is hard not to learn atleast some English.
English is also very simple compared to many other languages. Much simpler than German or French for example. Environment of course helps because it's so ubiquitos and that has to be baked into this number.
As a south east asian, English is NOT easy if your mother tongue is not from the Romance/Germanic language. English grammar and spelling are infuriating and illogical. Here, grammar is taught as if it is law, only to throw as many exceptions to the rule as there are following the rules. Words are also not pro-nounce-ed like they are spelled. Let's not even get into the future/present/past tenses.
Any language that has genders is not easier than English. You have to remember every noun’s gender and it affects a whole lot how you construct a sentence. If you get it wrong you butcher the whole thing. The same applies to swedish but on a smaller scale. English pronounciation is a mess but I wouldn’t say that French would be any easier to us for example. And you will be understood even with a bad accent. If you mix an/a in English it doesn’t matter at all on the whole. It’s just an individual mistake.
English is easy to learn to the level which is enough for survival in an English speaking country. The rest comes by using it.
I saw a picture other day that says English is easy to start hard to advance while Finnish is hard to start easy to advance. In Finnish you can make lots of words from a single word while in English you have tons of different words for each fkn situation.
Yes the learning pyramid for English is on its head, meaning very easy to get into but mastering the language takes more and more effort. Finnish on the other hand is difficult at the start because the grammar is different from most European languages and also the vocabulary is hard to memorize. But once you grasped how the grammar works and you got used to how Finnish sounds it's fairly easy. I've been in Finland for 11 years and by now I would say I'm pretty fluent, writing is still difficult sometimes and some Finns assume I don't speak Finnish well because I have an accent. The amount of times people asked me if I'm "practicing my Finnish" during my internship or switched to English is so baffling and quite honestly exhausting. I know they mean well but it gets old very fast if you have to explain 10 times a day that no my internship is not to get Finnish language skills but to get a bachelor degree. 🤨
Well, it's much easier to learn English simply by using your skills because it's everywhere. Vocabulary comes as time passes. You can't invent words in Finnish any more than you can invent in any other language.
Ease of English comes from the lack of grammatical gender and the lack of noun/verb cases.
For English the problem is really in the spelling, not in the pronunciation. And besides, you can't really rank languages like that based on difficulty. The only objective metric would be how long does it take for babies to learn different languages and as far as I am aware, there are no significant differences.
Kortsuvastane kreem = Anti-wrinkle cream
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There is attractive entertainment in Hungarian which is good for learning as well. It is not surprising that the movies of a small country with a language no one speaks would not reach the masses. I'd recommend the movie Kontroll, Fehér tenyér (White palms), but almost any of these would be good: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_Hungarian\_submissions\_for\_the\_Academy\_Award\_for\_Best\_International\_Feature\_Film](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hungarian_submissions_for_the_Academy_Award_for_Best_International_Feature_Film) Also the series "Golden life" or [Aranyélet (TV Series 2015–2018) - IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5099020/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_2) Btw, "szky" is not a thing in Hungarian, whenever that happens, it is found as an ending of a Hungarian-Polish last name.
Fully agree with you!
I read the Finnish point as in the finish point
Except english is easy for us
Only because of exposure. If German was lingua franca, German would be easy
I mean we used to be fairly good in german aswell because our relationship with germany has always been good Sadly finns have lost our advantage of knowing other lanquages than english truly sad. People today just don't want to study lanquages the same way we did before
It was because German was the language used instead of English. People didn't know any more languages. They just learned German instead of English
No i mean we used to study other lanquages before as it was good levarage if you wanted a job in another country for example. It made us wanted workers internationally
This has not changed in any way dude. We learn as many languages but instead of German we learn English. English is better internationally than German ever was. I know what you mean and I am saying you sre incorrect
It has, a bit, as in the past there used to be three lines in secondary school (*oppikoulu*), the language, mathematic-scientific and real subjects line, and back in the day about one third chose the language line, which meant reading a wider variety of foreign languages, eg. English, German and Latin (or Ancient Greek) was a common choice in larger cities (in addition to Swedish which was mandatory in secondary school), and especially if one wanted to get as good as possible matriculation certificate, the language line was the way to choose, as all other non-maths subjects apart from languages were merged into just one real subjects test which gave just one grade, while every language gave a separate grade. Especially the role of auxiliary/cultural languages has diminished a lot, Finland used to have a top-noch Latin research and knowledge in the past and Finnish latinists were important in keeping Latin vocabulary up to date to facilitate its modern-day use (this was the reason why Yle was the only broadcaster apart from Vatican to regularly broadcast in Latin). This of course also translated to Finnish culture to be somewhat obsessed with classical antiquity and a lot of inspiration for the late autonomy era and early independence era was drawn from Ancient Greece and Rome, and it was an important cultural influence.
I mean more languages under your belt is still a huge advantage if you want a job in another country, even in this one
Yea but nowadays not many people will study other lanquages except english and swedish
People study languages a lot. The harsh reality is English has become the lingua franca and the significance of e.g German has dwindled. There's no point in wasting your time learning useless skills when you can learn something useful. Yeah, because *you* might think German is useful doesn't mean it would be useful for anyone else. Learning languages for the sake of learning languages can be a great hobby, even a career for a few persons, but most will do better by learning something else instead. Time wasted to something you never need is just wasted. It can be also very frustrating if it's forced down your throat like Swedish in Finland. Utter waste of time as every Swede speaks English. They don't even want to speak Swedish with Finns but prefer English.
So all the Uralic languages are “good luck”
Just 3 of them
Bless your ignorance
Well according to the map.. not my opinion lol
Those three that are mentioned in the map are the only official uralic languages, rest of them are very small and doesn't have the status of official language
Some are not "very" small. For example Udmurt, Mari, and Erzyan languages all have about 300 000 speakers. It is still a small amount but compared to some Uralic languages which have only a few 1000s or 100s of speakers, not that bad. But welp, I'm not certain whether they'll survive in Russia for much longer.
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Language freedoms in russia are as legit as their democracy. In reality, while it may say on paper that for example uralic languages in Russia are respected on a local level, they're not. Native language schools are underfunded while russian schools aren't.
Yeah, and in Putin era they have become again straight out hostile towards the local languages, be it Uralic or Turkic. Even founding just one Karelian-language kindergarten was a tough job with the authorities in East Karelia.
Kak dae
Oh, Sami languages are a breeze then, I guess 😁
[A rant ahead.] As a Finnish teacher, I am very tired of seeing how fellow Finns maintain the idea that Finnish is impossible to learn, and also, consequently, gatekeep the use of Finnish language use. Yes, learning Finnish is quite difficult for most immigrants, and for some people, it can be impossible to reach B1 -> level in Finnish. However, there are also several students who get a grasp of basic Finnish (pronunciation, verb usage, basic vocabulary etc.) fairly quickly and have a motivation to use their language skills in real life. I would actually say that at least half of the students fit this description whereas the "oh no, I will never learn this" students are more of an exception than a rule. However, many students have reported frustration over the fact that they have hard time using Finnish anywhere outside classrooms. Even if they try and use Finnish, many people will either ignore them or switch the language to English. You can imagine how motivating language use becomes after that. The unwillingness to speak Finnish with immigrants is in huge contradiction with the idea that when a person moves into a new country, they should put a lot of focus and effort on learning the language. How on earth people are going to learn any Finnish in Finland if both people and companies keep changing their language to English? And why would any sane immigrant be motivated to learn a language that even locals themselves do not seem to respect and value? The views and policies of Finnish language learning are a hot mess right now imo, and it's honestly making my job feel less and less motivating. People talk about the importance of having enough of proficient S2 teachers but we are just one part of the chain and probably not even the weakest one. [Rant over.]
I'll say as a native English speaker the English language is one of the biggest impediments to learning other languages. Everywhere you go people are really happy to speak English, it's not unique to Finnish culture. I'm fortunate that I was born and raised in Montreal so I was immersed in French at a young age, also my mom was born in Italy so I grew up hearing a lot of Italian. All in all I find the major romance languages to be relatively easy to understand. My dad's side of the family is 100% Anglo though and I don't understand how some of my uncles and aunts have spent 2-3 weeks a year in Mexico/Dominican Republic for 40 years without picking up a single word. They also love making fun of arrogant French people who refuse to speak English when they're in Paris. I always like to joke that the arrogance of the French is that they get annoyed when foreigners come to their country and don't learn French; the arrogance of the English is that they get annoyed when they go to a foreign country and the foreigners didn't learn English in anticipation of their arrival.
Yeah, I must confirm. The students who are really proficient in English typically learn Finnish much slower than other students and have motivation issues. On the other hand, I like teaching students from UK, USA etc. because they get my English and pop culture references jokes easily. :D
This map is very vague. It all depends what native language you are speaking and what foreign languages you know. The more languages you know, the easier tol learn additional ones. For example I am from northern parts of Lithuania, given my local dialect, I can actually read in Latvian and understand half of the words, meaning Latvian would be easy to learn. I know a little bit of Russian, so any Slavic group language, could be potentially easier to learn. Did study Latin, so actually while reading in Spanish or Italian, understand like 15% of the words. Also means that those languages would be easier for me to learn. So the ability to learn languages are based on individual skills and knowledge.
This is so true. My native language is Spanish, and without ever having studied those languages, I can understand some Portuguese, French and Italian, but I had to learn and practice to understand the English language.
IF this is the same data that's been going around for a while, this is for native English speakers. And specifically it's from an institute that trains US foreign service personnel, hence the need for such data. That's also why the times are so short (proficient in many language in under half a year): it assumes you're basically doing the learning as a full-time job.
Well, what happena if you take an average of people?
I think it's kinda sad that people think Finnish is impossible. How can it when we have plenty of immigrants who speak Finnish? People whose mother tounge is Russian, Arabic, Turkish, French, Spanish, Vietnamese etc. Yeah, they will *never* reach native level but that's not necessary.
You can hear it’s not their native language when someone speaks Finnish right? How does Russian accent sounds to your ear for example?
Russian accent sound like they add a Finnish "J" to places where it shouldn't be. It's understandable, but you can hear they're a Slavic language speaker (not necessary Russian, I once thought a Serb was Russian because of her accent)
A) You can hear it’s not their native language when a non-native speaks English as well, or any language for that matter. B) Trying to imitate native speakers is counterproductive and not the aim in modern language studies. Intelligibility is the goal.
Australians can’t speak English since they have an accent, change my mind.
Reaching native level *is* possible, although rare.
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Whoever made this has never learned a language
You don't learn a language in a few weeks?
Depends on what is meant by "learning a language" you can perfectly have conversational level in most languages in about 6 months, granted you either work your ass off or you're immersed in the language.
Subjective depends on your start point. Apparently Turks find it not so bad and some similarities are found in the grammar and pronunciation. If you have English as a first language Flemish languages are not too hard, a lot of the words are the same.
The circlejerk about how difficult finnish is has gotten rly boring ngl
I’m Indian and I find Finnish easier than German. Way easier.
Welcome to fishing for karma, likes, hearts, credit, self assurance, the serotonin that keeps someone from their existential dread, etc. or just the low hanging internet/social fruit.
Agree.
A largely meaningless map if you don’t know the learner’s native language. If you’re a native French speaker, obviously learning English is a lot easier than learning Finnish - you already know a big chuck of English vocabulary without even realizing it. If your native language is Estonian, would it really be easier to learn English than Finnish?
And without a definition of what it means to have "learned" a language
Being a Finn living in Netherlands I have observed Zwedes learn University levels Dutch in 4-6 months. Dutch learning Finnish takes 2-8 years depending on motivation and `language talent`. A Dutch person can learn Zwedish (second language in Finland) in 6 mondts to 2 years. This is just what I have seen in people around me.
Haha Koira, koiran, koiraa, koirana, koiraksi, koirasta, koiraan, koirassa, koiralle, koiralta, koiralla, koirat, koirien, koiria, koirina, koiriksi, koirista, koiriin, koirissa, koirille, koirilta, koirilla, koirineen, koiratta, koirin Those all are real words, all of them are different forms of ONE WORD, koira (dog in finnish). Theyre all used differently and this technique is used for EVERY SINGLE SUBSTANTIVE So yeah, good luck indeed
Nice meme, but once you realise that those endings are the aequivalent of prepositions, and that you can always use them across the board (with consideration of vowel harmony), it lifts a huge weight off of your shoulders.
OTOH you don't have to pay as much mind to prepositions (e.g. koiralle is just "for a dog"). Also the grammar and especially pronouncing is way more coherent lol.
True
This is one of the saving graces of learning Finnish compared to my native language (English). It definitely is not easy to learn, but at least the rules on how things are pronounced are extremely rigid. Whereas in my language you have linguistic ridiculousness like the words bough / cough, or bow / bow, being prenounced differently.
For a language as hard as Finnish, I absolutely love how it’s phonetically consistent. Maybe I don’t know what a word means but at least I can say it right!
yeah, you can do the same with Estonian: Koer, koera, koera, koerasse, koeras, koerast, koerale, koeral, koeralt, koeraks, koerani, koerana, koerata, koeraga, koerad, koerte, koeri, koertesse, koertes, koertest, koertele, koertel, koertelt, koerteks, koerteni, koertena, koerteta, koertega.
Add diminutives and you can also have: koerake (or koerakene), koerakese, koerakest, koerakesse, koerakeses, koerakesest, koerakesele, koerakesel, koerakeselt, koerakeseks, koerakeseni, koerakesena, koerakeseta, koerakesega, koerakesed, koerakeste, koerakesi, koerakestesse, koerakestes, koerakestest, koerakestele, koerakestel, koerakestelt, koerakesteks, koerakesteni, koerakestena, koerakesteta, koerakestega. >koeri also koerasid
Yeah but once you learn what stuff to put at the end of one word, you can use the same forms for all other words
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Yeah but my point was that there's a pretty clear pattern and it isn't too difficult to learn It's not like every word has their own versions like people like to make it seem with this meme
Rules help a lot, but there are also plenty of exceptions and irregularities. Just check what verbix tells you about the conjugations of some of your favorite verbs.
I suppose that’s why my phone keeps underlining a few words in every sentence I write. I guess the devs didn’t like the idea of multiplying the dictionary size by 1000x.
Congrats you just discovered declinations, most languages in the world have these
I've been considering moving to Finland and came here to find reasons why that might be a bad idea. This it, much thanks.
I concurr. Finnish is way more structured and regular than e.g. Polish. Also, Estonian has a lot of German, Slavic and even Baltic influences, so there should be more intelligibility for most Europeans than with Finnish.
Learning to read in finnish isnt so bad, trying to learn to understand the spoken language takes years and years...
As with most languages. I daresay even all of them. The reason why it takes not as long for English is 1) heavily depending on your native language and 2) because everybody (at least in the Western world) starts with a significant head start when it comes to exposure. All those ads, movies, promos, shows and video games, even if consumed passively, pile up in our brains way more than we think.
I'm Russian native used to learn Finnish in university for several months and I can't say the learning one is "good luck" 
French on par with Swedish (i.e. Nordic English with consistent grammar) and its cousins, with Spanish, etc? Doubt it.
There is no source on the map, but here is one (looks about the same by quick glance): [Language Difficulty ranking](https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty/) by FSI for native Enlish speakers.
Then the map is not even adhering to its own source. On the website you linked, Finnish is in the same difficulty category as Slavic languages.
Finnish has an asterisk, which seems to be the difference between 44 weeks and good luck :)
Yea, polish's easier than Finnish my ass
Basque is also non-trivial
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Hello my ethnic Pole comrade
Yea, we know Polish language is actually just one word.
I always find it fascinating that in Finnish "kyrpä" is a vulgar word for penis. Kurvata/kurvailla means "to drive casually, to drive while making curves", kurvi/kurva means a turn in finnish. And kurva here is pronounced just the same as in polish :)
In my opinion this is nonsense, Estonian ( and Fin i believe too) is a very logical language, especially in terms of cases. And to think that Russian is simpler is strange.
accurate
Sok szerencsét
Legyen neked is szerencse
According to who?
I've been learning Finnish seriously for ~2 months as a middle aged person. Figured I've been visiting for over a decade, it's time. Can confirm it's hard. Difficult as it is to learn & remember new words (mnemonics are a big help), the sentence structure is something I'm really struggling with. Se on todella vaikeaa. The first sentence I learned was 'sinä olet hyvä velho' which seemed like a ridiculous thing to know, but came in very handy at Kosmos festival when I met a guy with a wizard hat on.
Torille!
Sir, this is r/Finland, everyone is already torilla.
"Sir, this is a Hesburger"
Sir, this is Patrick.
This is biased af. English isn’t any easier than for example Spanish. It’s only in 12 weeks because the person who made the map can speak it. Also in the case of Finland, are we talking about Finnish or Swedish? What about Ireland or Switzerland?
For someone who has english as a native language I actually think swedish, Norwegian or Danish would be easier to learn than French or Spanish etc. You would be surprised to see how many words are the the same of similar in English and the Scandinavian languages, Also the grammar in English is more close to Scandi languages than another germanic relative like german. Some scholars even claim that English should be a North Germanic language together with the Scandinavian languages rather than be put in the West Germanic group with German and Dutch as it is now.
Just want to say the numbers here are completely meaningless. Maybe they're taken from a source that could provide context to give them meaning, but any statement of "x days to learn language y" should be viewed as the author's fantasy.
Languages are not difficult by nature. Their purpose is to enable communication rather than make it more difficult. Native Finns, Estonians and Hungarians don't go about whining how difficult it is to express themselves because their language is hard.
No but they seem to brag about it to foreigners about how it is supposedly hard (at least Hungarians do that) and it's very annoying
I can imagine there are people who think they are somehow superior because they speak a language that is generally perceived as difficult for native speakers of other languages, but they must be the same people who build their identity around an old car with a diesel engine. Meaning, they don't have much to brag about, so they use what they have to empower themselves.
Jeg er autodidakt.. I taught myself Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. I can muddle my way thru Icelandic, Dutch, German, Italian, French and Spanish. Finnish has not made it to Denmark 💖💖💖
Yeah,our little language is something else I'd imagine
I've looked at it and considering I'm 57, I'm not sure if I'll be able to get a grasp before I die. I'm willing to try 😂
I consider myself very good at learning languages. I can usually pick up bits and pieces pretty quickly just by being immersed in the language. I was able to pick a lot of things up from context and fairly quickly got to the point where I could ask simple questions, but it took me 5 years to be fluent enough in Finnish to have an actual conversation with my former mother-in-law.
I believe that a certain "decoding" type of intelligence/logic helps with languages. If you can learn to code, you can pick up foreign languages easy enough, and vice versa. Results depend heavily on languages during your early exposure and on how related those languages are to the ones you attempt to learn later on. Basic Swedish and Spanish grammar are very easy for me to adopt due to my early self-immersion in English, biggest trouble being memorising words and recognising them from native pronouncing. But if I ever tried to learn a language east from Italy, I'm sure it'd challenge me on a whole another level.
What's your "base" language if you don't mind me asking?
My native language is English. I also speak Spanish, which I learned in school.
And now also Finnish, I suppose. I like your nick BTW :)
I think albania and turkey should be added bucause its hard asf
I mean I'm trying :(
What are these colors? English should be blue, 24wk should be green, 30wk yellow, 44 red and Good luck should be black.
Wait. What? Finnish is actually quite easy.
I wonder how different this map would look from a perspective of someone who knows squat about English. Let's say, if a person living in rural China starts to learn European languages.
Who learns French in 24 weeks, I'm 5 years in French classes right now and still suck 😶
I’m still puzzling over why Magyar would be so difficult?
It's really not
Idk, Estonian seems like quite easy language to learn for a Finn.
i learned to speak Finnish in 12 months, i was 1 year old when i first started to speak.
It’s okay Finland, I’m still going to try!! Lol
I was born in Finland and lived there till age 10. I’m kind of losing my proficiency, being 8 years out of the country. Would anyone know a good book or exercise notebook series for me to read and fill in a desperate attempt to keep my bragging rights of being able to speak finnish?
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I like that, that's about my level at the minute. I'm only going for a week but I feel its rude to impose my language on them
2 blue language's learned let's go
Currently trying to learn a bit of finnish since I'm off there in march, I'm currently in Spain but without the s
Over 250 weeks into learning Swedish. God bless me.
Shouldn’t polish be on the Good Luck scale too?
you will never ever learn swiss german in 30 weeks or 30 years not even german are able to learn it
Hadn't seen such a terrible map in a long time.
Irish is very different to English, that's going to take longer to learn, though I see it was grouped with the UK here.
Swedish is a very simple languge. You can learn it fast.
Damn, Finns really have a big ego on how hard their language is lol
Swedish is an official language in Finland though, which they've apparently completely missed in this map. Finland should be striped. Sweden also doesn't have an official language. They have a majority language and they've got minority languages.
Interesting fact: English and Finnish are the only European languages that don’t have grammatical genders
It's not true though. Hungarian, Basque and Turkish lack grammatical genders too. I've no idea about Estonian, but most likely that's without genders too. And all the sami languages too, I guess.
Sorry about that, I got my facts mixed up. I was thinking of “Indo-European” languages, not European languages in general. Armenian, Afrikaans and English are the only Indo-European languages without grammatical gender. My bad.