Is Finnish a difficult language?

One of the blog visitors suggested to discuss the subject "Is Finnish really that hard to learn?", so here we go.

My opinion is as simple as this: "It is easy to learn Finnish, but it's very difficult to use it". In this article (which will probably continue in more than one "episodes") I intend to go through all the aspects of the language, evaluate them by comparing to other languages (mainly germanic and latin-rooted) and pointing out the similarities and differencies.

Although very good background information on Finnish can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_language, I will approach it from the perspective of a foreign learner rather than from that of a linguistical one.

Sounds, Letters and Words

The first contact with the language brings up two issues: how it sounds and how the words look like. In Finnish you write as you read, meaning generally that each sound corresponds to a letter. If one compares it to French or English, this is definitely a big advantage in learning the language. Some small troubles may appear with double consonants, but once one gets used to it, everything's fine. On the other hand, due to the structure of the language, the compound words can become unusually long, take for example the well-known slogan word of the current leaders in Finland: "hyvinvointiyhteiskunta" = welfare society. Yet again, once one gets used to this, it does not seem that troubling anymore.

The alphabet is an ordinary one, for me the only new letters were: y - pronounced as German "ü" and å - a Swedish letter pronounced "o".

[to be continued]

Plural of Numerals

Finnish is odd at least from one point of view: the numerals can have plurals. Moreover, even the numeral "one" can have a plural. And I am not refering here to the type of plural like "ones", or "twos" in English which denote a multiple quantity of numbers one or two, like in this example: "The twos in this text should be written with different fonts." And since numerals are nominals, they can be inflected potentially in any case.

Let's start with the following example: "Ostin kahdet housut" - "I bought two (pairs of) trousers". The noun "housut" has only plural form and since the numeral "kaksi" will agree with the noun, it has to be in plural also: "kahdet"! These are inded special cases, but this is as well a special characteristic of the Finnish language.

When writing the above sentence into the negative form, we'll have to use the partitive (because the rule requires that only partitive is allowed for objects in negative sentences). So: "En ostanut kaksia housuja" - "I did not buy two (pairs of) trowsers". "Kaksia" is the plural partitive form for the numeral "kaksi".

Another example:
"Ostin ne yhdet sakset" - "I bought those (that pair of) scisors."