finland: i can speak finnish and i live in finland and finnish is the second hardest language in the world because of the cases and the endings' that you add to the end of the words. i think polish would be way easier to learn.
Wrong.
Finnish is actually quite a simple language. Contrary to Slavic or Romance language, the first steps are quite steep, but you will eventually reach a plateau: there isn't so much grammar after all in Finnish.
The problems of Finnish are:
- different feel from Indoeuropean languages, different vocabulary - which is paradoxical, as most lexicon is Indoeuropean, though this usually doesn't help much, as both Finnish and Indoeuropean languages have changed the original words in different directions;
- pronunciation, but there actually isn't any sound you don't know from English/French/German. Ä, Ö, Y aren't so difficult after all.
- cases, a good number, 14(15), but of these six are locational (w, na, do, od/z) and some are very rare, relics from the past. That leaves only 3(4) cases: nominative, genitive, partitive (and accusative, which is equal to one of the others).
- consonant gradation: word stems, both nouns and verbs, get specific changes, especially with K/P/T - something Polish is full of too.
On the other hand:
- the verb system is easy, there's even no future tense
- almost no prepositions, which cause so many headaches in other languages (w vs. na in Polish, all Romance languages, English phrasal verbs)
- you pronounce as it's written, fixed stress, no omophones (u/ó, rz/¿, ...)
- very easy sounds, for example only one sibilant (?), s and one affricate -ts-, as opposed to s/¶/sz/z/¿/¼/c/æ/cz/dz/d¿/d¼
- no gender
Just to debunk a myth.
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