OT. Of course, the English idioms are tough to pick up and use in the right context - and those prepositions have to be used correctly, which is difficult. "In" and "On" often seem almost interchangeable to non-native speaker, even though they aren't. I think that "modular" languages like English might be easier to learn to *write*. Each Finnish word takes more than twenty different forms to be memorized individually. The word "shoe" in English is easy to learn. In Finnish you need to learn forms like "kenkä", "kengän", "kengästä", "kengittä", "kenkineen", "kengätön", etc. This isn't really intuitive - another, very similar word will have slightly different forms.
It's true that a major compensation comes from the fact that each Finnish word is pronounced exactly as written. The hard part of English is that the written form of a word contains no hints about the pronounciation. If you heard me mangle spoken English you might draw the same conclusion I have - English is easy to write, but Finnish is easy to speak.
Tero |
