Hello guys!

[Mats Norberg]

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.

[linguaholic]

Hey Mats

I have never really tried to study Finnish so far. but it looks like an interesting language. When I was younger, we always went to Finland for holidays. That was lots of fun and we picked up a few words here and there. Like Maito for Milk, motoori for motor and a couple of others. That is unfortunately not enough to make a conversation, though.

I know that Swedish and Finnish are completely unrelated languages. So how is it going with your Finnish studies? Do you find it difficult?

Best,

L

[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

 

[linguaholic]

6 hours ago, Mats Norberg said:

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

 

23

Very interesting, Mats! Whenever I see a Finnish text, I feel like the words look so funny. Lots of consonants put together to form some weird words :=) and then there are those ä, ü and other umlauts.  

The words indeed seem pretty long. but with the example you gave, I can see that might be not much of a problem. Moreover, German (my mother tongue) also contains some really long words.