FINNISH - PROBABLY THE BEST LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD?

That pronouncing every letter works the other way around too: if a native Finnish speaker hears a new Finnish word, he/she immediately knows how to write it.

"J.R.R Tolkien took an interest in the Finnish mythology of the Kalevala, a 19th-century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot. He then became acquainted with the Finnish language, which he found to provide an aesthetically pleasing inspiration for his Elvish language Quenya. Many years later, he wrote: "It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me." and used it to construct Quenya."

This was a very nice "Finnish in a nuthshell for English speakers" -video. I am a native Finnish speaker.

It's always nice to watch when a foreigner breaks down finnish language. It gives me a whole new perspective to my language which I have taken for granted all my life. So thank you very much = Kiitos paljon! or Paljon kiitoksia!

You said Aiti. You do use Ä-sound in english words like angry (Ängry), sad (Säd) or Hanging (Hänging).

I grew up in a Part of Northern Minnesota that had a strong Finnish demographic ( including my family). It even had an effect on the local dialect. It was habitual to drop pronouns from sentences when they were implied. "Went to the store" rather than "I went to the store" etc.

as a native Finn I can only imagine the struggle of learning finnish, especially with how different the spoken language can be.

Not sure if it's the best, but it is absolutely THE BEST language for bad language and cussing someone out.

Nice to hear that you appreciate finnish language. Kiva että arvostat suomen kieltä.

A small clarification: the dots on Ä and Ö are not umlauts. Umlauts modify the pronunciation of already existing letters. It's a bit confusing because of the look of the letters, but for all intents and purposes, Finnish Ä and Ö are considered wholly separate letters, not modified A and O.

1: if you say Cät, Car and Cän out loud you will hear the difference between Finnish A and Ä. 2: Double consanant is important so you don't accidentally mix words. When kids are tough to read we use hyphen - to teach reading "ta-vu-ta tul-li, tuu-li ja tu-li." (hyphen customs, wind and fire.) and then you learn to say Tul and you rebeat Tul Tul Tul Tul and then you learn to read Li Li Li Li Li and then you say Tul Li and now you read Tulli right 👍it takes a little time to get used to but once you get it you can just start reading Finnish well. Tuuli = Wind Tuli = Fire / Came Tulli = Customs Edit. for examples in Mennä at 6:10 he actually says Menä with single N and not double NN. The hardest part is to understand that after you say Men Nä to say Mennä you hold the N between Men and Nä. Basically you hold the N sound after saying Men and then continue with thät position Nä so the tong never resets between the N and sounding the NN trough both hyphens <3 bit hard to explain in text which is why learning it with someone is much better. 3: Finland's hardest part is just a puzzle game how to bend words. To come would be Tulla so if you will come Tulen and if you already came Tulin.At the same Fire's would be Tulen. Tulisinkoha? = I wonder if I should come? 4: You can google "Finnish the Dog meme" which will explain you how wild Finnish is

I was born in Finland but moved to Sweden more than 50 years ago. Honest people still ask me if I am from Finland, they can hear it, but somehow I can not. It's a strange thing, I can not hear it myself, even if I know Swedish better than Finnish today.

Respect sir from a British guy also living in Finland for creating this video. Been here for over 15 years and while I understand enough Finnish to get by I'm terrible at speaking Finnish. Love that you use the term 'bend' when referencing verbs rather than a much more English term such as conjugate as it shows how little time it takes for even changes in how we talk in English to rub off on us.

When you said that Finnish is a very concise type of language, I began to wonder that perhaps that has something to do with why we have a reputation for being stereotypically silent or a people of few words. It's not something we can recognize that easily ourselves, but it's very interesting to hear what our language is like from a non-native speaker. Very intriguing.

Your finnish is great! I don't know if it's because of the pronunciation or misunderstanding, but that's not how A and Ä are pronounced and differ. A is a more clear sound that's hard to find in english, similar to U in "sun". Ä on the other hand is very prominent in English, e.g A in "apple".

always nice to have someone trying to learn this weird language of ours. you're pretty good considering how long you have been learning!

I love learning languages, this was really interesting and I want to give it a go! 🇫🇮

I remember reading that Tolkien, a great scholar of languages, had two favourite languages: Welsh and Finnish.

as a finn I find it funny how "Ä" pronounciation gives so much trouble to foreigners. It's a very natural vowel, kinda what babies cry all the way from birth x)

An important thing to note about puhekieli is that there isnt one puhekieli and it's more a matter of that Finnish is a language of many dialects in the finno-karelian continuum. The aggressive formality of the standard language is both a necessary solution to unify these dialects without favoring a single one too much and also leads to the fact that nobody speaks it day to day. In a different timeline of history there could be several written languages here but instead we've unified somewhat. Also, counterintuitively Ä is actually the one that sounds like the english A in most cases, like in the word sad, while A sounds more like the A in car or how the british say bath. Though vowels are more of a continuum and there isn't always an exact match in different languages, leading to confusions and weird accents.