Is Finnish the most complicated language to learn?

I was always told that English was the easiest language to speak badly and the most difficult to speak well!

<<I was always told that English was the easiest language to speak badly >>

Sure looks like it's a whole heck of a lot easier than Finnish on all accounts.

English is way more diverse than Finnish. You have hundreds of millions of speakers all over the world whereas Finnish only has about 5 million speakers almost limited to one geographic area.

But spoken Finnish is enough to give some headaches because it has a lot of reductions and some different word orders from "formal Finnish".

It all depends on a language

i have tried to learn Finnish without any great success :)
but being Slovak, i can say that for native english speakers Slavonic languages are far more complicated...

But spoken Finnish is enough to give some headaches because it has a lot of reductions and some different word orders from "formal Finnish".


This is true, Finnish is diglossic, just like Swiss German and Brazilian Portuguese, formal language is so different than the real Life usage, it's like learning two different languages all at once.

Congratulations, JF, if you had claimed you are a Finn I wouldn´t have doubted it though it is not common for a Finn to have a last name that begins with 'F'. It wouldn´t be impossible for a native Finn to make such mistakes as you did. You are an excellent living example that it is not impossible to learn Finnish! We Finns don´t always realize how difficult the difference between written and spoken Finnish is for foreigners. Of course, this is partly due to the fact that there are not too many people who are interested in learning Finnish (except for the growing number of foreigners who live and work in Finland).
The reason why there is a gap between spoken and written Finnish is that our grammar and ortography are conservative. Estonian has dropped many 'extra' letters and even grammatical load, like possessive suffixes, and therefore spoken and written Estonian are very close. It is interesting to notice that in colloquial Finnish there are similar changes taking place now as in Estonian some centuries ago, and this results rather from the inner logical development of the language than Estonian impact.