Well, people often assume that Finnish must be similar to the languages of neighboring Sweden or Russia. And that’s why it is a difficult one to learn. Our article tells you why that’s simply not true. Finns often run into questions like “Is Finnish like Swedish?” or “Does everyone in Finland speak Russian?” an easy answer to both questions is not any. Finnish vocabulary through daily practice and language learning resources.
Finnish learners often find developing language skills to be a challenging aspect. Both Swedish (one of the 2 official languages of Finland) and Russian belong to the Indo-European group of languages, while Finnish may be a Finno-Ugric language. The latter group also includes Hungarian, Estonian, Sámi (spoken by the indigenous people of northern Finland, Sweden and Norway, and northwestern Russia), and a number of other lesser-known languages spoken in areas of Russia. The Finno-Ugric languages share enough common lexical and grammatical features to prove a standard origin. Although these languages have developed separately for thousands of years, it is often seen that common features include:
- absence of gender (the same Finnish pronoun, “hän,” denotes both “he” and “she”)
- absence of articles (a and therefore the in English)
- long words thanks to the structure of the language
- numerous grammatical cases
- personal possession expressed with suffixes
- postpositions in addition to prepositions
- no equivalent of the verb “to have”
Why is Finnish in particular a hard language to learn?
The Finnish language – is a Uralic language, which means it is unrelated to other European languages except Hungarian(which is still very distant from it). Finnish uses a wide range of sounds not found in other languages.
In our view, the cases would be the most challenging ones.
In terms of difficulties, Georgian is way more complex with quite a few exotic features.