Finnish is often on the top 10 list of the most difficult languages in the word. Those brave enough to embark on a journey to tame this fairy tale language are immediately trialled by red flags about the insurmountable complexity of grammar rules, not to mention the weirdest-sounding vocabulary.
In other words, Finnish is too difficult a language to learn, don’t even bother.
But hear me out: these claims normally come from native English speakers, whose mother tongue is part of a completely different language family.
So not very credible judges, one might point out.
Taking a more objective view, I’d like to examine what makes a language difficult to learn – and more importantly, to answer the question: is Finnish really hard to learn?
Let’s look at some aspects in which a language can be considered more or less difficult, and see, whether Finnish passes the test.
Whether you find a language hard to learn, first and foremost depends on your native language. If your target language is very similar to your native language, it is obviously much easier and faster to learn.
This applies to any other language you speak as well. For example, learning Spanish was very easy for me because I was already fluent in French and Italian. All of these are Romance languages, sharing the same origins – Latin – with a lot of the same grammar and vocabulary.
When it comes to Finnish, I’m afraid I’ve got some suboptimal news. Finnish has very few close language relatives, and most of those are only spoken by a few thousand people in Northern Scandinavia. So the probability that you already know one of the close relatives of Finnish is quite low.
This, in my opinion, is the main reason why Finnish is doomed so difficult: because the languages you know are based on a completely different system.
But if you ask someone fluent in Estonian – the most widely spoken cousin of Finnish – if they find Finnish difficult, you will get a strong “ei” (that’s “no” in both Finnish and Estonian).
Being unique is great, but in this case, it does make Finnish more challenging to learn for most people – unless you’re Estonian.
One of the main aspects of “an easy language” is a highly regular and logical grammar. The more irregular the grammar, the more difficult the language is to learn.
It’s worth noticing here that I’m not talking about how complex the grammar is. Complexity is a very subjective quality and again, depends on what you personally find complex in a language.
An irregular grammar means that it includes a lot of exceptions with zero or little logical reason. The irregular French verbs and the illogical English prepositional verbs used to be (and still are!) particular stumbling blocks for me.
It might come to you as a surprise, but Finnish is actually a very regular and logical language based on reliable principles. Although those principles are often numerous, Finnish surpasses many other languages in its predictability and relatively few grammatical exceptions.
To make things even better for Finnish learners, may I point out that Finnish lacks many aspects that are often hard to learn, a.k.a. illogical, in other languages.
Think of gender distinction: why would a car be feminine and not masculine? (In French that is, because the Spanish disagree even though these are very close language relatives.) Or what about stress placement in English? In Finnish it is always on the first syllable.
I’m not saying that Finnish has the most straight-forward grammar ever. Even as a Finnish native speaker, I would not be able to explain the logic behind most of the Finnish ‘rections’ – the way nouns and adjectives are declined after a certain verb. Why do we say tykkään susta (I like you) but rakastan sua (I love you)? No idea, but that’s how it is!
Finally, I just want to reveal something pretty ground-breaking about the Finnish grammar. I often hear people say that Finnish is impossible to learn because of the cases – the endings that are added at the end of the word. But let me tell you a secret: cases are the same thing as prepositions!!! If you don’t believe me, watch this video.
This one is pretty self-explanatory; it is obviously more challenging to learn a new language if you first have to learn a completely different alphabet or writing system.
That’s one of the reasons why I’m hesitating to start learning Russian, despite the fact that I find it absolutely beautiful!
Finnish, in this regard, can be regarded as easy to learn for anyone who knows the Latin alphabet – the most widely adopted writing system in the world.
If you get confused with the ‘ä’ and ‘ö’, just keep in mind that these help us produce the same sounds as for example in the English dad and in the French cœur.
Speaking of sounds, those too can make a language easy or hard to learn. If a language contains sounds that do not occur in many other languages, or especially in the languages you speak, you might find it extremely difficult to pronounce those sounds correctly.
Hands up if you’ve had difficulties with the French ‘r’! I’m with you there – in Finnish we roll it, much like Italians and Spanish.
Thinking of the most difficult languages to pronounce, I’d probably pick some of the Southern or East African languages with click consonants. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a great demonstration.
But turning back to Finnish, it doesn’t really contain rare sounds, unless you count our diphthongs. Diphthongs are combinations of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable, like in äiti (mother) or yö (night).
The trick is to pronounce both vowels, which might feel strange at first, but actually makes Finnish so much easier to pronounce. Why? Because you never have to guess how to pronounce any words!
Finnish has basically a 100% one-to-one letter-phoneme correspondence. This means that we pronounce exactly as we write. Forget silent k’s (knight) or 4-letter words pronounced with one sound (haie). This is a very rare feature in languages and helps your learning a lot – so 10 points to Finnish.
Ok, ok, there are a couple of minor exceptions to this rule – watch a video about it here.
I’d say that one of the most time-consuming aspects of learning a new language is assimilating the vocabulary. All. The. New. Words.
Which is why, if a language shares a lot of vocabulary (with a language you already speak!), it is faster to learn.
English has borrowed much of its vocabulary from Latin – and what it didn't get there, it just took from French. I take advantage of this a lot: if I don’t know the word I need in French, I just pronounce the English word with a French accent – works most of the time!
As the Romance languages are all based in Latin, much of the Western European languages share a ton of vocabulary – another reason why, for a lot of Europeans, South and North Americans, many of the most widely spread Western languages (English, Spanish, French) are quite easy to learn.
Finnish, on the other hand, unfortunately does not share a lot of vocabulary with these languages. A zoo is a zoo in pretty much all the other European languages except in Finnish: eläintarha – literally ‘animal garden’.
This just means that when you learn Finnish, it will take some extra time to acquire all that new vocabulary. But you know what: that’s exactly what I had to do when I learned English or French. I never thought it was a problem until I heard a French person complain about not being able to just use their French vocabulary with a Finnish accent. Boohoo.
Of course, we do have some loanwords and are constantly getting more and more of them. I’m sure you can deduce what viski, taksi, trendi and tiimi are.
And no, not all Finnish words end in an ‘i’ (but if you don’t know the word you need, you can try to add an ‘i’ after the English version – this works some of the time…).
I bet that there are more English courses out there than what you could go through in a lifetime. Probably the same for Spanish.
The more quality learning resources at an affordable price there are, the easier it is to, first of all, find a suitable one, and second, study the material and learn the language.
What is a ‘quality resource’ is a very subjective question. For me it means a resource that helps you acquire the language in the shortest time and with the least effort possible and leaves you with the ability to understand and speak normal everyday language.
I personally don’t use courses that teach about the language and explain all the details of the grammar – often in English – but fail to transfer the complete understanding of that language into my head.
This is why I use the natural method. It’s been scientifically proven to be the most efficient way to learn a foreign language.
But if you prefer a course with a more traditional method, you need to choose wisely. That’s because many Finnish courses out there teach the standard Finnish (kirjakieli) – the official form of the language only used in writing and in the President’s Christmas speech. The real spoken Finnish (puhekieli) is very different, and Finnish learners who have only studied the standard form often find it nearly impossible to understand the normal spoken Finnish.
There are a lot of resources available for learning Finnish, either online or in a classroom. But so far, my online course Finnish Me: Understand is the only Finnish course I’ve found that teaches the real spoken Finnish with the natural method.
Looking at the evidence, it seems that Finnish can feel difficult because it is structurally so different from other languages you most likely speak and because it shares relatively little vocabulary with other languages.
However, the Finnish grammar is highly regular and logical, it uses the mainstream Latin writing system and it doesn’t include rare sounds – all of which make it in fact easier to learn than some other languages out there. Good learning resources exist, you just have to find the right one for you.
To directly answer the question: is Finnish difficult to learn? I would say: not more than any other language out of your own language family. It is different form many widely spoken languages, but this doesn’t necessarily make it difficult.
As we’ve seen, many other features contribute to the difficulty of a language, and Finnish is not much worse off than other languages.
I’d guess that it is as difficult for a French speaker to learn Finnish at it was for me to learn French – I had to learn a completely new structure and vocabulary as well.
This is to help you get out of the panic and limiting beliefs when embarking on your Finnish journey. Take it as just another challenge, not more or less difficult than other things you are doing.
And if you want to learn 3 quick fixes to do in your Finnish studies so that you can progress with more ease and less effort, sign up on my free masterclass. You'll get the recording straight to your inbox!