[krageon]

Finnish is an absolutely atrocious language to learn for most people (unless you are already familiar with learning a language with a completely different root, and even then). That part will be hard.

I can't comment on the practicality of surviving with only English (or even Swedish, which most of them speak due to historical factors that I will politely gloss over), because I haven't tried.

[skrebbel]

>absolutely atrocious

I just want to underline that, unlike most European languages, Finnish grammar is highly systematic, and so is Finnish pronunciation. Very few exceptions, it feels almost mathematical in nature.

There's quite a lot of grammar, putting off non-nerds who think "cases" are hard because after all, they are hard in eg German and Latin (they're peanuts in Finnish). But for a geek with mathy tendencies, Finnish grammar is a warm shower compared to eg Polish or French or, for that matter, English. It's all so super consistent, it's as if it's a designed language.

A fun exercise when learning Finnish is writing a tool that can conjugate verbs or nouns, which is totally feasible in an evening or two, showing just how straight forward the grammar is.

The pronunciation is also super consistent and phonetic, which means that if someone teaches you a word or a name, you can simply hear how it's spelled. This makes it much easier to remember the word, since you can store the sound and the letters visually in memory, even if nobody writes it down for you.

Another fun hobby project is coding a Finnish speech synthesizer. You could just have it concatenate audio fragments for each letter. It'll sound like shit but it'll actually be understandable.

The real challenge with Finnish is the vocabulary.

(source: I'm Dutch, lived in Finland for a year half a life ago, tried to learn the language, walked away speaking it close to accent-free and knowing all the grammar but still not able to understand shit because seriously not a single word is anything like anything else I knew) (except appelsiini)

[jks]

> A fun exercise when learning Finnish is writing a tool that can conjugate verbs or nouns, which is totally feasible in an evening or two, showing just how straight forward the grammar is.

Only if you provide the tool with the stems of the words. For example, the genitive ending is -n, but the genitive stem of käsi is käde- and the stem of aasi is aasi- and figuring that out might not be within the reach of a two-evening tool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_grammar#Noun/adjective...

[misja111]

I don't agree that the Finnish grammar is highly systematic. Take instance, the partitive case. It seems to be applicable to a mixed bag of situations with all kinds of exceptions. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitive_case)

Another example: the inclination of the genitive case to nouns. There is a whole bunch of rules again with many exceptions. (See e.g. here: http://users.jyu.fi/~pamakine/kieli/suomi/sijat/genetiivien....)

(source: I'm also Dutch, my wife is Finnish so I have been trying to learn the language for many years with very limited succes .. )

[jolmg]

> if someone teaches you a word or a name, you can simply hear how it's spelled.

Is it like Spanish where you can also know how a word is pronounced by how it's written?

[skrebbel]

Even better, because Spanish has a few letters that change pronunciation depending on context, eg the g in guerra vs Girona.

[bernawil]

doesn't depend on any "context" in that example. Both written and spoken follow strict rules.

[jolmg]

The context they mean is probably the adjacent "u", which is true and is involved in the strict rules you speak of.

There is ambiguity with "x", though. I don't know if there are strict rules surrounding it. I know of 3 different sounds for it:

* Like Spanish "j", English "h" as in México, Xavier, Oaxaca

* Like Spanish "ch", English "sh" as in Xoloitzcuintle, Xela

* Like English "x" as in excepción, exacto

[skrebbel]

Yeah that was badly worded. I meant context the way parsers/lexers use the term, not the common language speaker's definition of "the meaning of the surrounding words".

I meant adjacent letters.

[stevekemp]

It is possible to survive in Helsinki with only minimal Finnish, and work in the IT-industry. In smaller places it might be more difficult, but certainly people here are willing and able to converse in English.

Of course I would like to learn more Finnish, but daily life and childcare interferes with regular lessons. (Of course being able to work in English also means that speaking Finnish at work is also difficult.)

Since moving to Finland four years ago I've bought a couple of flats, found a job, filed taxes, visited doctors, dentists, and similar things all in English.

I understand a lot of Finnish, I just speak less. Ordering food, etc, is something I'd usually do in Finnish although it has to be said a lot of people will either initially greet me in English, or reply to me in English which is a bit frustrating.

[Hamuko]

>Ordering food, etc, is something I'd usually do in Finnish although it has to be said a lot of people will either initially greet me in English, or reply to me in English which is a bit frustrating.

I have noticed some establishments to quickly make a judgement call on what kind of language skills you have. I was once in a restaurant, reading over the Finnish menu and the waiter came and asked me if I needed any help translating the menu. I am 100% Finnish (some branch of my family tree extends to the 1700s at least), so I didn't really need it.

[hopia]

I know British IT consultants living and working in cities with ~100,000 inhabitants in Finland, working in high profile IT consultant agencies. Knowing no Finnish whatsoever. It seems definitely doable.

[Mediterraneo10]

> Finnish is an absolutely atrocious language to learn for most people

Things have changed a lot in recent years. In the 1970s, or even the 1990s, then sure, learning the language would have been very difficult due to the limited selection of learning material and dearth of social opportunities to practice (the Finns being so famously taciturn). Today, however, there are so many different textbooks for Finnish that a foreigner can find one that matches his or her particular approach to language-learning, and there are lots of meetups now in Helsinki for foreigners to practice.

I learned Finnish many years ago when things were rather more difficult, and I envy the opportunities that immigrants to Finland today have.

[fsloth]

I have lots of non-finns at my work who speak very little finnish. They seem to do fine. On the other hand integration to finnish society might be bit of a challenge unless you happen to find a sweetheart here.

"or even Swedish, which most of them speak due to historical factors that I will politely gloss over"

Most finns _don't_ speak Swedish, or it's very limited. It's a second language in law only because Finland was part of sweden from 1300 - 1800. There is nothing too politically awkward to gloss over. Finland was not conquered by sweden. We basically were swedes for 500 years, with a weird local language that no civilized person spoke.

Historically Finland could have been part of either a feudal society that became inclusive (Sweden) or that became stereotypically exclusive (Russia). As part of Sweden Finland was among the forerunners of countries that got a modern legislation and administration in the 1600's and strong cultural ties to the rest of europe. During this time the elite spoke Swedish.

The political interaction with Russia during this time was handled mostly by military means.

Finland's population rose from 50,000 to 800,000. The population of the entire country was less than the population in global biggest cities (a trend that continues to this day).

There was not much input to scientific or cultural development of the world as most energies were spent in surviving winters without famine and evading capture into slavery by invading various eastern entrepreneurs. Industrialism took it's first faltering steps, but there was not much capital to invest (a trend that continues to this day).

Then came Napoleon, who wanted to pressure Sweden to join into an embargo against England. At this point France was allied with Russia (this would change eventually) but for now Czar Alexander in 1808 was happy to oblige.

The initial plan was not to take control of Finland, just to occupy it until Sweden acquiesced. Things happened, and Alexander decided to keep it. But what to do with it?

As it turned out, there were two trends working to the benefit of the finnish polity. First, the czar was pretty sure sweden would eventually like their dominion back. Secondly, this idea of small nation states as buffers between big players was taking hold among the great nations (Belgium was one of these as well a few decades later). And there were no resources that the czar would really like. The country was foreign, there were no feudal lords the czar could command, the whole area was controlled in a totally unrussian way. Sure, he could put his boot down and russify the lot, but all of the things discussed above lead to the fact that instead Alexander accepted a plan that Finland would become a semi-autonomous duchy with it's own constitution and money. This would have been quite an impossible idea a century later but now it felt as an excellent idea.

There was only one problem.

There was no finnish national sentiment to speak of. And you can't have a strong autonomous nation state without a sense of nationality. At this point all educated people spoke swedish. Basically, it was an area ripe to return to sweden.

So, czar happily supported and encouraged the few individuals that thought that Finland should have it's own national spirit (the sentiment of nationalities was already spreading in europe and was not totally foreign in finland). So, in effect, they machined a campaign that it was effectively _cool_ to be finnish. Swedes changes their names to finnish in droves.

At this time, finnish language as a written tongue started to develop as well. It had more or less stagnated until now, but as finnishness was becoming a thing, surely something should be written in it as well.

So that is the reason there are no great literary works in Finnish before the early 19th century. There was no literary tradition, and everyone who would have been capable of producing great works wrote in swedish and other european languages any way.

So now we have a country with more or less modern administration, a national sentiment and a language. But it's still dirt poor.

This would be remedied eventually. The russian governors recognized that their domain was mostly unindustrialized backwater, and they heavily supported industrialization efforts. The funny thing is, that on the other side of the border the russian state did not support extensive industrialization, but on the finnish side it actually supported it quite a lot.

In effect, russian domination gave finland it's national identity, it's governing body, it's industry and supported it's literary and artistic efforts. Finland effectively was a dominion under czar's direct authority, and finn's loved their czar.

This love changed to something else in the late 19th century as the russian state started a strong russification push in all of it's dominions. But finns were still more or less content as their life went on. The finnish elite is strongly part of the russian high life - St. Petersburg has a large finnish population and finnish artisans produce goods for the wealthy. For example more than few of the Faberge eggs were made by Finnish artisans.

Come 1917, the czar dies, the house of Romanoff is no more, and the finns discover to their horror that legally they are no longer a duchy under russia as the way it was legally written was that finland was under czar's domain and not part of the russian state. Legally, it seems they are now on their own. Horror changes to realizing a possibility of an actual nationhood. So, a few politicians travel to Lenin to kindly point out that legally they are no longer part of russia, and, ahem, they would be very greatfull if the bolsheviks could awknowledge this. Lenin can do whatever he likes with them, but frankly, he has bigger political problems at hand (he will have for a while as the russian civil war will rage for years) and so for some reason or other he let's the silly finnish bourgeoise have their cute little state. The communists will anyway take over soon as the masses will rise in rebellion.

Except, they won't. There's a bloody civil war in 1918, finns settle it, continue existence as a parlamentarian state and... that's where it all comes from.

In II. world war they block soviet invasion with strong support from Nazi germany (yes, they were basically in league with the nazis but the alternative would have ranged from soviet opression to total annihilation - had he won Stalin could have basically destroyed every finn if he felt like it. He killed ten times more soviet people as an afterthought as there were finns in total.).

So, basically, Finland is country filled with people who for the most of civilized world history have died of starvation and have been hunted as slaves. Only in the last 150 years the country emerged from a rural backwater into a fairly succesfull nation state.

This history explains quite a lot of the typical finnish egalitarian sentiment. We've died of starvation. We've been sold as slaves. There's been no rich local lords since everyone has been equally miserable. There's been no big cities. Most of the urbanization has happened in the last 50 years. So, we're a bunch of people who's families are mostly country yokels, who's families have been quite poor, but who really like to read and write, do maths and enjoy cool gadgets.

I think the main reason Finland is pretty successful is it's centuries long history of inclusive institutions, and intentional investment into human capital (i.e. education). This history is very strongly linked with the swedish state and language, in one way or another, hence, there is nothing impolite about it.

Sorry about the long post.

[enra]

As a Finn, this is great. I would just like to downgrade "strong support from Nazi Germany" just to support, and later a nuisance.

Initially Germany and Soviets made the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact to divide the Europe. Nazis would get Poland and Soviets would get Finland etc. They were agreement at first, so Nazis stayed away for the Winter War (1939-1940) and Finland had to block attack on their own since most of the Europe was allied with Soviets or Nazis.

Later in the following Continuation War (1941-1944), Finland asked for Germany's support when they tried to reclaim some of the areas Soviets had previously taken, including the city of Vyborg. German sent some arsenal and troops from Norway. I think the number was 40,000 compared to 500,000 Finnish troops.

So I think it wasn't that much of a "strong support". Also the German troops didn't have the tactical skills or right equipment for long lasting forest/winter warfare, so they weren't that effective either. They were used to Blitzkrieging everything.

Most of the German troops were stationed in the Northern Finland and once the peace was found with Soviets, Finland had to fight the Germans to get them out of the country. Along the way, the German troops scorched everything they came across on their retreat to Norway.

[fsloth]

Thanks, it's good to point out to an international audience that Finland was not enamoured with national socialism, but rather it was driven by the will to survive by any means necessary.

Strong or not, given the situation, I don't think Finland could have survived without german support. If we look this from a very high granularity level (like in a board game of Diplomacy) I think you also have to factor in the fact that the bulk of the red army was tied to battles against the axis powers elsewhere. So it's not just how much the germans actually poured material and men to finland, it's also about how much they tied the enemy forces elsewhere.

[alexanderchr]

Very interesting, thanks for the history lesson!