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For someone learning German as a foreign language separating the words would really help. Even if it leads to things like "Trink Wasser fur Hunde" (as mentioned in the Wikipedia article).

Hyphens or spaces are still better than those long words...



Yes, I can see that. Pervasive hyphens would resolve most of the ambiguity and make it easier to learn. (But they also look kind of ugly.)

Just be glad you ain't learning Turkish or Finnish, though.


I find the difficulty of learning Finnish is being consistently exaggerated on the Internet.

Source: Learned it as an adult myself.


Oh, I'm not saying it's difficult (no clue whether it is). I'm saying that they have long words.


What languages did you speak before learning Finnish and what level are you currently at?


> What languages did you speak before learning Finnish

In order of skill, or chronological? C: German, Swedish, English, and French. S: Swedish, English, German, and French.

> and what level are you currently at?

"Level"... Lived and worked here 26 years (longer than in any other country), usually speak only Finnish with colleagues. (Exception: my previous job, 2014-18, at an unusually international company; quite a lot of English there.) What number is that, on whatever scale you were thinking of?

[EDIT:] IOW, it's gotten to the point where I fear my actual native language is only my fourth-best any more, Finnish having pushed it off the podium. [/EDIT]

Anyway, my point was: I may have improved a bit since, but was probably quite close to my current "level" after two or three years. It really isn't all that humongously difficult as it's made out to be.

The logic of a multi-inflected agglutinative language may feel unusual at first, but once one gets used to it, it's just that: logical. The orthography and especially the pronunciation of Finnish is the most straightforward of all the languages I've dabbled in (smatterings of perhaps half a dozen more besides the ones I speak). And I think, above all, it has the fewest cases of "this is the rule, but the exceptions are this, that, and the other", where you just have to learn by rote that "this word works that way, but that word works this way", of any language I've come across. Learn the rules and you know it; no exceptions to learn.


Sori jos kuulosti hyökkäävältä, kiinnosti vain kuulla lisää miten suomen oppimisen vaikeus koetaan :)

I'd say that it's fluent level then. I've met people that have lived in Finland for 20 years but can't still form sentences in Finnish.

The "Finnish is hard" trope is probably a mental block, Finnish probably seems hard on surface but it's very logical if you dive deep into it.


No kyl se näyttää hyvin avaruusoliokieleltä ellei sitä ainakin vähäsen jo osaa, joten kai ihan ymmärettävää...


Compound words are about 70% of the fun we have.


We don't have much fun in Germany..


That actually compounds the problem.




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