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Old 03-02-2015, 12:33 AM
 
Location: Finland
6,418 posts, read 7,207,766 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rams_Lord View Post
I think you'll find it is, haha . Compare it with your neighbouring Swedish and Norwegian. I think there was a time I thought I'd learn Finnish. I decided to teach myself the numbers first and after I saw the numbers after 10, I never done another lesson again.
Finnish is difficult but finally (its only taken me seven years....) you reach the point when it comes naturally. My grammar is still atrocious because that is bloody difficult but now I can finally speak and understand Finnish without having to translate it in my head, and think in Finnish too.
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Old 03-02-2015, 12:58 AM
 
Location: Finland
24,144 posts, read 24,665,839 times
Reputation: 11103
Quote:
Originally Posted by natsku View Post
and think in finnish too.
<3

Here, take a rep. You deserve it!
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Old 03-02-2015, 11:20 AM
 
4,449 posts, read 4,589,487 times
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Re: "Georgian and Mongolian are not Finno Ugric languages"

Yes that is correct. Don't want to confuse. With Mongolian I assumed the Uralic aspect was nestled in some way with the FU languages as well considering the geography.
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Old 03-02-2015, 12:25 PM
 
1,470 posts, read 2,066,193 times
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Sanskrit, of course.
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Old 03-02-2015, 02:06 PM
 
338 posts, read 333,129 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Miserere View Post
Sanskrit, of course.
No, it is very very very complex yet not redundant or overly irregular. It is not an atrocious mess like its Indo European Bretheren.
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Old 03-02-2015, 02:41 PM
 
1,600 posts, read 1,877,008 times
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Every language has some sort of difficulty and there's no hardest language because the perceived difficulty varies according to your native language.
I met Korean speakers who had problems with basic English but could solve out rather easily Chinese grammar problems, I saw Swedish speakers with a perfect mastering of English having a lot of problems in speaking French and so on.
There's no "hardest": Chinese has an elementary grammar, really basic, but its writing system and the tones make it hard.
Italian appears easiest to read but it has a complicated grammar with a tricky usage of subjunctive and a difficult pattern in intonation (to give you an example, it took my father 30 years to learn Italian like a native and sometimes I can still detect his foreign accent).
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Old 03-02-2015, 04:07 PM
 
Location: Shrewsbury UK
607 posts, read 644,282 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by travric View Post
Re: "Georgian and Mongolian are not Finno Ugric languages"

Yes that is correct. Don't want to confuse. With Mongolian I assumed the Uralic aspect was nestled in some way with the FU languages as well considering the geography.
Uralic is the family to which FU belongs (along with "Samoyedic", spoken in northern Russia). Once it was thought that there was a "Ural-Altaic" family, but that's now been discredited as has Altaic on its own. Basically there are several families in Eurasia which have very similar grammar, but very little common vocabulary; this has led to controversy about whether they are related or not. Uralic, Turkic, Mongolian, Japanese, Korean, Yukhaghir (another Siberian family) and Dravidian (southern India) are all in this category and have been linked with each other in various ways by different studies.

I wonder how easy Finnish is for a Japanese, Mongolian or Turkish speaker, and vice versa?
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Old 03-02-2015, 04:15 PM
 
692 posts, read 952,023 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by xander.XVII View Post
Every language has some sort of difficulty and there's no hardest language because the perceived difficulty varies according to your native language.
I met Korean speakers who had problems with basic English but could solve out rather easily Chinese grammar problems, I saw Swedish speakers with a perfect mastering of English having a lot of problems in speaking French and so on.
There's no "hardest": Chinese has an elementary grammar, really basic, but its writing system and the tones make it hard.
Italian appears easiest to read but it has a complicated grammar with a tricky usage of subjunctive and a difficult pattern in intonation (to give you an example, it took my father 30 years to learn Italian like a native and sometimes I can still detect his foreign accent).
Agreed.

There's no hardest language to learn, the hardest language to learn for an individual will vary from person to person based on what language they already speak. For me, Gujarati may be a hard language to learn but for someone who speaks Hindi or Punjabi it may be rather simple. For someone who's Haitian, speaking Guadeloupean Creole may be easy but learning Spanish may be hard. It all varies.
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Old 03-02-2015, 05:26 PM
 
4,363 posts, read 7,023,487 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by slowlane3 View Post
French has at least EIGHT different ways to spell the sound "AY" (e, ee, ai, ais, ait, aix, et, est)
.
I forgot "ez" - so that makes NINE ways to spell the sound "AY" - and roughly nine ways to spell "OH".
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Old 03-03-2015, 08:02 AM
 
Location: Finland
24,144 posts, read 24,665,839 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Walshie79 View Post
I wonder how easy Finnish is for a Japanese, Mongolian or Turkish speaker, and vice versa?
I don't know any Japanese or Mongolians, but for Turks Finnish is as difficult as to anybody else, it seems. Neither is Japanese anyway simple to Finns. No, I don't see any connection.

The fact that the Uralic language group is much smaller than the Indo-European one confuses many, but it doesn't mean that the languages would be more similar. Technically compare Swedish and Greek. There just aren't many similarities. Turkish, Japanese and Mongolian aren't even Uralic languages.

Last edited by Ariete; 03-03-2015 at 08:13 AM..
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