Finnish is easy

I was always fond of hosenträgersicherheitsgefühl, but now I have a not long enough language complexity inferiority complex

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Genus, not genre… :slight_smile:

No. It is more than that. “Koiraksenikokaan” is basically a whole insulting sentence: “I wonder, if you can even become my dog, if anything?”. This shit comes from the ancient time when the human had not invented a concept called sentence. Every thing had one word and then you tried to make new words by modifying them old words.

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Most of them are Dog+something else tacked on, anyway. It’s not all that complicated in reality. None of my Finnish friends would use most of them anyway or see them in newspaper articles. You can do this in German and in Swedish if you really want to annoy the people you play scrabble with. Hundkorgsfilt, hundgårdsstängselnät, hundmatskålsinnehållsdeklaration etc. ad nauseam… :wink:

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Yes, you always spell it like it sounds and pronounciate it like it spells but the grammar can be a bitch to remember in the beginning. Russian is far worse to learn. I’ve tried…

You have absolutely no clue. These are not compound words. It is only this one word, which is modified to produce new meanings. I already translated “Koiraksenikokaan” as an example. It is basically a whole insulting sentence: “I wonder, if you can even become my dog, if anything?”.

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My finnish friends won’t ever use 90% of these “words”. It’s like somebody sat down with a dictionary and wrote down all combinations of “Dog plus whatever” until he got bored… :slight_smile:

I am reliably informed that Estonian is worse.

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Most of them are Dog+something else tacked on, anyway. It’s not all that
complicated in reality. None of my Finnish friends would use most of them
anyway or see them in newspaper articles. You can do this in German and in
Swedish if you really want to annoy the people you play scrabble with.
Hundkorgsfilt, hundgårdsstängselnät, hundmatskålsinnehållsdeklaration etc.
ad nauseam… :wink:

Det är en praktisk mekanism när nya uttryck behöver uppfinnas. Min egen
favorit på sammansättning är exaktheten i mor och farföräldrar,
mormorsfarmor osv.

I’m reliably* informed that to an Estonian, Finnish looks and sounds like “really old fashioned Estonian with too many dots”.

* Drunken biology professor in Finnish pub

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Finnish is an agglutinative language, like Turkish, Hungarian, Korean or Japanese. It is easier to pronounce than Turkish, not as weird as Hungarian, and much easier to read and write than Japanese. All the endings are fairly regular compared to, say, conjugating a Spanish verb or declining a Polish noun, or having to memorize Arab plural forms. So yeah, Finnish actually is pretty easy, (so is German, for that matter). The biggest problem you will have if you want to learn Finnish, as a native English speaker, is that 90% of Finns already speak perfect English so you are really imposing on their good will if you force them to struggle with your bad Finnish. Also, there is not a huge treasure trove of literature or films in Finnish that foreigners care about. 99% of learning a foreign language is motivation, and I imagine it is very hard for most English speakers to get sufficiently motivated to take the time and discipline to learn Finnish. I saw a poll once of Austrian/German university students, asking them why they were studying Finnish. Apparently over 70% were doing it because they were metal heads and were fans of some Finnish metal bands. Definitely a niche culture.

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I was an exchange student in Germany, but my host mother was from Finland. (An exchange student who fell in love and never went home.) Whenever she spoke Finnish on the phone I thought it sounded like she was speaking on both the inhale and the exhale. But I do like the Finnish frontal trill, it makes everything sound like singing or chirping!

So many umlauts in Finnish (and Estonian), OF COURSE they have the best metal bands.

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As finn I can say that about a third of those words are in common use, the next third you’d see mainly in writings such as novels or articles and the last third are rarely used and often replaced with two or more words to avoid confusing structures

That’s quite a long list, let me know when you’re Finnished.

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I hope they weren’t too disappointed when they learned the lyrics read “Let’s all get along as the flowers do. You be a daffodil, and I’ll be an iris. Together we can join the brown of the earth and the green of the grass, and explode into a rainbow of pink, purple and yellow.” (cue operatic-length sustained scream over distorted power chords on bass)

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I’m pretty sure one of those is “It is possible you will see hooded figures in the dog park.”

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I know people who are so gluten sensitive that, once they learn this, will never touch another Kaalikääryleet for the rest of their lives.

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Well, most of the European ones are basically the same. Like Dutch is the average of English and German. French, Spanish, Romanian etc are all basically the same. Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian likewise. Stand back far enough, they’re all the same deal really. Earthers are pretty simple creatures. Not like us Tarry Titanians.

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Can you give an example?

P.S. Google translate says this is Swedish, not Finnish nor Saami. True?