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qingcharles11/07/20241 replyview on HN

How hard have you found Finnish? As a language addict, I've always heard (and seen) that it is very hard. Hungarian hard.

I worked for Nokia for a while, but was lucky that everyone I spoke to in Finland spoke perfect English.


Replies

hiAndrewQuinn11/08/2024

It's about as hard as you think, yeah. Its quasi-isolate nature means that both its vocabulary and its grammar structure are pretty alien to anyone from the outside looking in.

On the other hand, Finns are super active on the Internet. There's a lot of Finnish content out there if you know where to look. ChatGPT writes passable, if clearly English-word-ordered, Finnish, as confirmed by my native speaker wife. So it's a long climb to the top -- but at least you have a lot of comprehensible input to work with. Can't quite say that for, say, the Algonquian languages.