[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.