Before I learned Finnish, I always thought of it as the language that looks like someone just went crazy on the keyboard. Just look at this newspaper headline, for instance. (Here is an entire article in Finnish.)

Vaalien ennakkosuosikki keskusta liputtaa maakuntahallinnon puolesta

And after I learned it a little, I still thought it looked like someone going crazy on the keyboard.

I’ve studied quite a few languages in my life, but I find Finnish to be by far the most difficult. And while it may just be that I find it particularly challenging, there is no doubt that it is one of the more difficult languages to learn, for an English speaker at least.

Here are some of the challenges that come with Finnish.

1. The words are very long.

Let me say that I’m not just trying to complain here. There is a reason Finnish words are so long, which is related to grammar. But whatever the case may be, it makes it difficult to remember new words you just learned. For example:

mehiläinen

This is a word I remember having difficulty with. It means bee. In English, that’s one syllable and three letters. That’s probably why I found it tricky. But wait, it’s also much shorter in all these other languages:

abeja (Spanish)
bij (Dutch)
ape (Italian)
včela (Czech)
abeille (French)
bie (Norwegian)
pī (Maori)
arı (Turkish)

Four syllables seems a bit extreme in comparison, no?

2. Spoken Finnish is different from written Finnish.

As an au pair in Finland, I had to attend Finnish language classes. I would leave the house in the morning and return in the afternoon, having learned phrases like:

Mikä sinun nimeni on? / What is your name?

or

yksi, kaksi, kolme, nelja, viisi, kuusi / one, two, three, four, five, six

But in reality, what I heard people saying at home and on the streets was this:

Mikä sun nimi on?

and

yks, kaks, kol, nel, viis, kuus

It took me a while to realize what people were saying, and I was surprised by the fact that I supposedly already knew these words. But in written form, and not in abbreviated spoken form. And I wanted to speak, so it was like an extra step I had to learn in order to do so.

3. Finnish grammar lives in its own world.

This is the biggest reason Finnish is so difficult for many people. As we all know, languages have families. Here’s an awesome illustration by Minna Sundberg, a Finnish/Swedish artist. (She’s awesome — you should check her out!)

You’ll see that Finnish belongs to a very small family of languages known as the Finno-Ugric languages. And honestly, besides Hungarian, Estonian and Sami, I’ve never even heard of the other language branches there.

You’d think perhaps Finnish may be related to its neighboring Scandinavian languages, but in fact it has nothing to do with them.

Finnish has a completely different set of rules that seem like they’re from another planet, because it’s so unfamiliar. I don’t even know if I could explain it very well — seeing as I still don’t really understand Finnish grammar — but let’s try. Just something simple.

Mennään rannalle. / Let’s go to the beach.
(Or menääks rannalle in the spoken version. Why? I don’t know.)

Mennään means let’s go. Okay, I accept that. Even though having two n’s and two ä’s makes it look super funky. Whatever. It’s kind of cool.

But rannalle confuses the heck out of me. Because rannalle means ‘to the beach’. But beach in Finnish is actually ranta. And somehow it has now transformed into ranna. Or is it rann? The lle, or alle at the end means ‘to the’. It’s like, Let’s go beatothe.

So there you have it. Why Finnish is hard. Even Finns say to me, with plenty of sympathy (or is it empathy?), that yes, Finnish is hard. And when even native speakers refer to their own language as hard, well, you know something’s up there.

But now here’s the real kicker.

Because it’s so difficult, it’s ironically also the best language to learn.

That is to say, you’ll have a good time with it.

Finns are very generous to people who try to learn their small, difficult language. They are impressed by the tiniest bit of Finnish you can muster. If you can say hello in Finnish to a Finn, they will be delighted. And there is just no better encouragement in the world.

So, to start you off, here’s how to say hello in Finnish, so you can impress a Finn.

Hei!

Wait, was that too easy? After all this talk about how difficult Finnish is? Okay then, here’s another word you can use to say hello.

Moi!

Still too easy? Good. Language is about baby steps. Seriously. Babies learn languages, right? They don’t even know what grammar is, for heaven’s sake. So why should you know it from the get-go, in a language you’re hearing for the first time?

Start with a simple hello, and you can go on to master even such a difficult language as this one. And now you probably know more Finnish than 99% of people in the world. (Finnish is spoken by 0.07% of the world’s population.)

To cap it all off, here’s Can You Feel the Love Tonight from The Lion King in Finnish. Because listening to Disney songs is one of the best ways to learn a language. After all, that’s how kids learn, too!