Is Finnish the most complicated language to learn?

Hay !

I'm a Frenchman but I speak a little English ^^

I guess French is one of the most complicate language because I leave in France and I speak it every day ! Adjectives, subjects and othes are so numerous !

Exemple : I say "French is the most complicate language of the world and it's so difficult to learn and understand" in French :

"Le Français est le langague le plus compliqué du monde et il est vraiment difficile à apprendre et à comprendre"

I can say you lots of sentences in French ! And if you want to learn French, contact me to this e-mail : jeff-923@hotmail.fr

I can learn you everything :P

Merci beaucoup et bonne journée ;)

PS : Un petit avant goût de Français que vous pourriez apprendre :P

Most of the so called "cases" in Finnish are actually just attached postpositions.
Unlike in German or Slavic languages, they are not governed by certain prepositions.
E.g. in German, "mit" is followed by dative, whereas "für" is always followed by accusative.

<< not so bad if you just think of the cases as postpositions... Thinking of it that way usually saves people from the fear of the cases... >>

Oh, I just discovered that Skippy had mentioned it already. Hehe.

Finnish has a whopping 14 or 15 cases for each noun. Which means each noun can be spelt 14 or 15 ways.

"Talo" means "house".

"Talon" means "of a house".

"Talona" means "as a house".

"Taloa" means "house" (as an object)

"Taloski means "To (role of) a house"

"Talossa" means "in a house".

"Talosta" means "from (inside) a house".

"Taloon" means "into a house",

"Talolla" means "at a house".

"Talolta" means " means "from a house"

"Talolle" means "to a house"

"Talotta" means "without a house"

"Taloineni" means "without my houses(s)"

"Talon" means "with a house"

Is that it? That's the difficult part? It must be more difficult than just having a stem and adding endings. Are the endings the same each time?

I saw that you have "talon" twice with two meanings.

Why is that in itself any more difficult than using prepositions? If the prepositions were attached to the noun in English you could say they were cases. I think the poster above is right, it is more difficult when preposition and cases usage is combined and the preposition governs the case.

I'm really interested in learning finnish, if any soumi wants to learn spanish (my native language), or simply chat with me, you can feel free to add me to the MSN: diosnoexiste84@gmail.com .

Kiitos

Hey! You never know what you'll get with that moniker. Are you hoping for a Finnish Christian or a fellow atheist? You may get both!

One of the best polyglots I heard was a Finn. He spoke Mandarin, English in addition to his native language. He may have been able to manage some other languages as well. It makes me wonder what the distance between Finnish and Mandarin is. How does one measure that?

So, anyway, thanks to this thread Finnish doesn't sound too hard to learn!

Both Finnish and Mandarin have the same word for 'she' and 'he'.

No language is as complicated as people make it out to be.

Jeff: Frenchman? You misspelt "français". We don't capitalize it. O,o

And "langague"? Who really says that? lol "langue" is much more common.




And "talon" as in "with a house". I think you meant "taloine". But we can only use the comitative case with the plural stem (see the "i" in "taloine"?)

And "taloineni" - "without a house". You just said "with my houses". "Without" would be the adessive case with an "-tta" ending. So "without a house" would be "talotta".

The comitative and adessive cases are rare in Finnish, but they're useful to recognize them. Instead, Finnish usually uses prepositions (they do exist, but they're few in numbers).

So I'll get to the cases... A brief view...

For "matto" (carpet)

Grammitical cases (four)
Nominative: matto
Genitive: maton
Accusative: maton
Partitive: mattoa

Locative cases (six)
Inessive: matossa
Elative: matosta
Illative: mattoon
Adessive: matolla
Ablative: matolta
Allative: matolle

The first three are internal cases and the last three are external cases.

Essive cases (two)
Essive: mattona
Translative: matoksi

Rare cases (four)
Instructive: matoin (only in the plural)
Abessive: matotta
Comitative: matoine (only in the plural)
Prolative: matoitse (only in the plural)

So that's sixteen cases.

Some of the rare cases won't even make sense at all with "matto" because they're hardly used in today Finnish. Prepositions usually replace these cases.

Oh yeah, most of the "matto" forms have one "t" because of consonant gradation. Consonants sometimes change when an ending is added. In this case, the "tt" becomes "t". It's tricky (one of the trickiest feature in Finnish in my opinion), but you'll get the gist of it after practice.

Finnish is just strange to people used to studying to IE languages, but after practice...you'll see it's just another language with unique sets of challenges. Not all languages fit into the same learning mold. ^^

Very good an explanation JF!

Kiitos!

I agree with 'Minä' that JF gave a good explanation. The cases are indeed like postpositions attached to the word. What makes the thing more complicated is consonant gradation, as JF told (matto - maton, leuka - leuan, kenkä - kengän etc.). Still, there are rather clear rules for this: the strong grade (matto, leuka, kenkä) is used when the next syllable is open (ends with a vowel), the weak grade (maton, leuan, kengän) is used when the next syllable is closed (ends with a consonant). There are some exceptions due to historical sound changes, like illative ("into-case"; mattoon, kenkään) where we find strong grade though the next syllable is closed. This is because the words sounded previously 'mattohon', 'kenkähän'. A few Finnish dialects still use these archaic forms. ['matto' = carpet, 'leuka' = chin, 'kenkä' = shoe]

A small correction to JF:s elegant explanation of cases: the comitative case of 'matto' is 'mattoine(en)'. 'Matoineen' would mean 'with his/her/their worms - consonant gradation is indeed tricky (matto -maton = carpet, mato - madon = worm)! Comitative can be used even in singular but the form is the same as in plural: 'ministeri tuli vaimoineen' = the minister came with his wife/wives. Thus, this sentence doesn´t indicate how many wives the minister had with him, but in our western society we can usually conclude that there was only one of them. This handicap of the comitative case is one reason why it is usually replaced in everyday speech by genitive (singular or plural)+ postposition 'kanssa' (= with): 'Ministeri tuli vaimonsa kanssa' (not: 'vaimojensa kanssa'). (-nsa is possessive suffix that indicates that something is owned by the subject)

Thanks to the Finns for confirming it all!

I'm glad I'm pretty much accurate with my explaination! I'm not close to perfect with Finnish, but this is what I have observed and learnt so far! :)

I do like knowing the rare cases, but I don't see them often...so it's natural that we all get them wrong sometimes. Usually, I'd say to learners...don't worry about them yet. Just learn how to recognize them by the ending and let them be. You can worry about them when you are advanced in Finnish. What I would say...commit a lot of time learning and practicing the consonant gradations and suffixes. Those are the best parts (and the trickiest as well) of Finnish. Word order is the next thing that is tricky for me because Finnish do not exact use a typical IE order (the English one to be exact). I would recommend worrying about the spoken language later until you understand the basics of "formal" Finnish (which is the written one). Spoken Finnish is almost like learning another language. If you think French and English are terrible with the spelling, well Finnish is terrible making a logical relation between the spoken and written languages. Just one of the spices of learning Finnish if you love learning it.