I’m still somewhat of a beginner in Finnish. Maybe advanced beginner or lower intermediate. For some reason I do not find Finnish as difficult as expected. After learning Russian, it almost felt “easy”.
For example, Russian has three genders, for me one of the hardest parts to grasp about Russian (in practice) is that the “У” endings swap depending on the gender, for example dative masculine and accusative feminine both use the same “У” ending.🤯
Perhaps if I had skipped Russian and gone straight to Finnish it might have seemed a lot harder.
Finnish on the other hand seems to be more consistent.
With Finnish, there is no gender. Also with Finnish, at least with these locative cases, plural cases more resemble their singular case case counterparts, they just include the letter “i” somewhere, that usually indicates plural.
If you understand how these locative cases work, and really they are not that difficult, then you are already half way there to understanding Finnish. It seems to me that remembering what the cases themselves are called (especially the locative cases) is harder than actually using them in practice.😅
More good news
I find (at least watching television) that some of the cases are not used anywhere near as frequently as others. For instance, the last three ‘marginal’ cases are rarely used in modern Finnish. The comitative is usually replaced with the postposition kanssa (“with”) [just put the other word in genetive case] and the abessive is usually replaced with the preposition ilman (“without”) [just put the other word in the partitative case].
Probably the most difficult thing is knowing when to use partitive and when to use accusative.
I’ll be completely honest here and admit that I still don’t know when to do this.
One difficult thing is also called “consonant gradation” (or the KPT rule). When words are inflected, the word stem may change: consonants may disappear, be doubled, or be replaced with other consonants.😨Some of these changes can be ‘predicted’, but honestly I think most Finns just remember it based on repeated exposure to the language and what sounds/looks right. I imagine Finnish kids don’t learn how to speak using KPT rule when they are young, they just copy.
I still haven’t completely mastered this either, no. I have learned to not expect too much from yourself when learning languages, it’s a slow process. Best not to try to be a perfectionist or you will drive yourself mad/crazy. At least in the beginning phase anyway.
As I said, I don’t pretend to know anything here, I’m not Finnish, or Russian, I’m not a ‘linguist’ either, so when I say “learn a language with leslie“, it’s more like learning with another student than learning with a teacher.😊
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