|
|
|
Learn Finnish
Finnish is spoken by people in Finland, and by Finns in other areas--predominately in Scandinavia. Finland is a country that is officially bilingual in Finnish and Swedish, and most Finns eventually learn both languages. In contrast, very few Swedes and even fewer foreigners learn Finnish.
The Finnish language is very easy to pronounce: it has one of the most phonetic writing systems in the world, with only a small number of simple consonants and relatively few vowel sounds.
Conversely, in terms of ease of use, grammatical structure and most vocabulary terms (barring direct English loan-words!) are completely strange to English speakers and to speakers of Indo-European languages. Fascinatingly enough, Finnish, a melodic Finno-Ugric language, is completely unrelated to almost every language between Ireland and northern India! Finnish is closely related to Estonian. Other related languages are S…mi dialects, which are spoken far in the north of Finland as well as in Norway, Sweden, and the Murmansk Peninsula of the Russian Federation, and, more distantly, Hungarian.
Pronunciation Guide
Basics
Problems
Numbers
Time & Date
Transportation
Lodging
Money
Eating
Bars
Shopping
Driving
Authority
Useful Links
| |
|
|
