I’ve often heard that Finnish is one of the most difficult languages in the world to learn. However, I’ve found Swedish is significantly harder for me to pick up. I think the key with Finnish is to throw away your Latin/Romance roots which help with English, French, Spanish, Italian and the like, and instead see it as a pure logic problem.

All you have to do is learn the rules, and you’ll do just fine. Unfortunately the rules tend to look something like this:

RULE: if the dictionary verb form ends NN RR SS or ST followed by -A/-Ä, then the A/Ä is dropped as well as the immediately preceding consonant. Before adding the personal ending add e for the present/future tense or i for the past tense. If, to the left of the N L R or S there is a weak form consonant or consonant cluster, it is strengthened in all of the present/future/imperfect forms.

And all that because I accidentally wrote opetellan instead of opettelen.

By way of example, so you don’t have to actually read the rule… työskeNNeLLä is the word for ‘work’. To get to ‘I work’, the ‘ä’ is dropped from the end, as well as the ’sticky L’ of LL, so the word becomes työskeNNeL-

BUT, now that we have L (a weak consonant), not LL (a strong consonant), the NN, which was a weakened form of NT is now allowed to be strong again… that gives työskeNTeL-

And then the present tense, first person ending is put on to make ‘I work’… työskeNTeLen.

These rules do become natural in the end… for example, the place name Joensuu is an interesting one… it comes from two words… ‘Joen’ - of the river and ‘Suu’ - mouth.

The word for river, though is Joki, the ‘e’ having been formed from the ‘i’ when the genitive ‘of’ ending was put on, and because the ‘en’ ending is strong, the ‘k’ which is also strong had to be dropped.

Like I said… easy!