Mats Norberg

Hei L! Thank you for your answere. Yes Finnish and Swedish are unrelated languages so far tht they belong to different language families and have different vocabularies end roots. But on the other hand finnish has loads of swedish lone Words (while swedish only has a hand full of finnish lones) Finland belonged to the Swedish kingdom for more than 600 years until 1809 to be more precise. I find many idiomatic parallels between finnish and Swedish where the structure and meaning can be almost litteraly transcripted although the actual words are completely different. Finnish seams to have more "recursive" complexity (such as extremely long participle phrases). This and the case system combines to make "advanced" finnish texts hard to read. Easy finnish texts, such as those texts you find in most children books, are easy to read. Learning words is not so difficult for me. Some people complain that the words are too long to be memorised. But as soon you know how finnish word formation works, long words are not hard to remember. You learn to recognize compound words, such as kirjahylly (kirta + hylly) = bookshelf as soon as you knows that kirja=book and hylly=shelf. It soon becomes almost self-evident what the long words mean. But over all. Yes, the language is hard! It will still take a long time before I reach fluency if ever. Mats

Is there any activity here? Some other guys or girls who studies Suomi? I have studies this language about 2 years but have still a long way to achieve fluency. My native tonge is Swedish by the way. If you are somewhere out there studying finnish, then maybe you could write a couple of lines and tell about your own finn-studies and share your experiences.

There's partitive after ilman and ennen. ilman Liisaa. ennen Liisaa.

Cases force us to be aware all the time what is the subject, object or some other sentence element. This stress can be quite exasting when you're just want to keep a convesation going. Especially if you're native tongue lacks cases. Always having to append case suffixes to every word. You'e not used to it.