To have your best time in Finland, it helps to know a little bit of the Finnish language, especially those Finnish words and phrases that can help you as a traveler a lot in case of problems. Ready to learn some popular words? Read on to discover how easy it is to learn Finnish!
The easiest thing about Finnish is the spelling, which is phonetic. So with a few tips on stress and pronunciation of vowels, every foreigner can read Finnish texts flawlessly.
Finland has long been part of Sweden. Since the Peace of Fredrikshamn (1809) it has belonged to the Russian tsar empire
In addition to Swedish, Finnish is one of the two official languages of Finland. It is spoken by almost 95% of the population. Finnish is one of the Baltic Sea languages in the Finno-Ugric language family. Within the Baltic Sea languages, Estonian and Karelian are closely related and higher up Hungarian is also related to Finnish.
Difficulty
Finnish is very difficult for most Europeans to learn. The rules are very different from Indo-European languages and the differences between spoken and written languages are large. Typical features are many (no less than 16) cases, long words (prepositions / conjugations pasted to nouns and verbs), an abundance of vowels and few consonants.
Even if you don’t understand the content, it is still nice to be able to pronounce all possible inscriptions on buildings, words on packaging, newspaper headlines correctly during a holiday in that wonderful country.
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Last Updated on June 17, 2020