How hard is it to learn Finnish as a German, who has also very high English skills and some Swedish skills? German and Finnish are both phonetic and logical language. Also I am used to cases, because of German, but still I fear the 15 cases. I might consider learning it, but my motivation goes from up to down, because everyone tells me how difficult and impossible it is to learn. I want to have an opinion from Finnish native speakers.

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omma · Answer

Agreeing with the previous reply.

I just wanted to add that Finnish has A LOT of Swedish loan words, and some German as well, so that might make it easier to learn some of the vocabulary.

And to make a tiny correction: English and German are Germanic languages, which means they are also Indo-European. Finnish is not an Indo-European, but a Uralic language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages

omma · Answer

@mozzyrelly Yeah, and then there are the days of the week: otherwise they follow the Swedish model, but then there's suddenly keskiviikko, which is the straight translation from der Mittwoch.

mozzyrelly · Answer

What will help you is knowing several languages and having the experience of learning them. However, whereas German and Swedish (both of which I speak fairly well) are very similar, sharing a lot of similar words and a lot of grammatical elements, Finnish is unlike any of the languages you mention. When I learn any foreign language, I use English and not Finnish as my point of comparison. Maybe that would change should I learn one of the few languages related to Finnish.

Finnish is not impossible to learn. Is it difficult? I imagine it's not difficult to get to a point where you are understood by other people and get the gist of what they are saying. To be able to express yourself eloquently and error free is a skill not all Finnish speakers themselves attain, partly because the formal language ("kirjakieli," or the "literary language") is far from how most people use Finnish in their everyday life.

I think you need to clear some fresh space in your brain for it, that's all. Like I implied, German, Swedish, English, all that, won't help you but having experience with three languages will doubtlessly help you should you want to learn a fourth one.

You do get a slight head start with the sounds of the language which aren't that different from German - imagine if you had to learn how to say Ö or Ü [written "Y" in Finnish]. And German has short and long vowel sounds (the difference between Stadt and Staat for example), which are important to pay attention to in Finnish.

mozzyrelly · Answer

@Mitternachtshimmel Actually German is Indo-European and Finnish is not. Finnish is a Uralic language. Most Finnish speakers would still find learning English easier than Hungarian, another Uralic language. Likewise Indo-European languages include many you'd find very foreign and distant. It depends more on what you are familiar with or familiarize yourself with than on scientific classification.

mozzyrelly · Answer

@omma A German friend was especially delighted to hear what Finnish speakers call a grand piano: flyygeli ("der Flügel" in German).