You know more Finnish than you think
9 comments
·August 4, 2025comrade1234
wrboyce
I have a(n English) friend who moved to Finland as an adult (in her 30s) and is now fluent in Finnish (and English, just the two languages for her) so it is certainly possible.
I have very jealous of your friend’s multi-lingual son though!
umanwizard
Finnish or not, it is orders of magnitude harder to learn any language as an adult.
keerthiko
IMO the hardest parts of learning a new language as an adult is
a) convincing yourself its worth the effort: almost every time an adult runs into a confusing element of a new language, they find themselves calculating how many people in the world speak this language, probability they don't speak english and likelihood of running into this person and circumstance, and it's easy to justify giving up and moving on
b) avoiding forcing it into the framework of your first language: if you have one distinctly favored language already, it's very hard not to try shove the new language you are learning into the former's mold, and this can be counterproductive in learning most languages that don't share an ancestor with your favored one.
a) is greatly mitigated by forcing yourself to be in said context by living in a place prioritizing that language. b) is greatly mitigated by already being bilingual+ with languages from distinct origins (eg: mandarin chinese and english) before learning a new one, so you can place the new language on a spectrum with the ones you already know instead of confined by the rules of just one.
rclkrtrzckr
Hey neighbour!
Growing up bi-(or even multi)-lingual is always a good opportunity when it comes to speaking, especially here in Switzerland.
former-emr-dev
at the time "proto-Germanic" is claimed to have been spoken, most of Germany spoke a slavic/celtic/local dialects unrelated to what was being spoken in Norway or Sweden and the association was constructed by german nordicists of the 18th century that drove popular indo-european philology based around grammar protocols established by international trade or diplomacy instead of words and tones used by natives in life and labor
decimalenough
The blog discusses ancient loans, but you know a lot more Finnish than you think if you look at loans happening today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finglish
Especially in the IT world. Printteri tilttasi, klikkaa linkkiä, koodi bugittaa, buuttaa serveri!
kleton
Nearly every word in every Uralic language pertaining to a tech level past the stone age is a loan word.
hackyhacky
Számítógép?
I have a Finnish friend here in Switzerland who believes Finnish is impossible to learn as an adult. I think because of the conjugations. She has a son and she is divorced from a Spanish man who remarried a Greek woman. Her son speaks German (Swiss school), French (Swiss school), English (Swiss school and all the other children at school), Spanish (father), Greek (step-mother and step-siblings), and because she makes a point of speaking Finnish with him at home, Finnish.
He has no problem with any of the languages including Finnish but she's still convinced that she needs to force it on him before he's an adult so that he can... well, I'm not sure why.