Is Finnish a difficult language?

Andrew Chesterman

 

The short answer is: it depends where you come from and where you are going. If you are a Finnish child, you will find Finnish no more difficult than an English child finds English or a Chinese child finds Chinese. If you are learning Finnish as a foreign language, though, it obviously makes a difference where you come from. If your native language is Estonian, you will not find Finnish very difficult: the two languages are closely related. If your native language is one of the Indo-European languages, on the other hand - like English, German, French... - then it will take you longer to get the feel of Finnish.

Where are you going? In other words, what kind of Finnish proficiency are you aiming at? Different people need different skills. Some want only to understand written Finnish, perhaps well enough to translate it. For others, the spoken skills are more important. What kind of motivation do you have? What level are you aiming at? It´s not so hard to acquire a basic conversational ability: Finns will notice anyway that you are not a native speaker - so there´s no point in hiding it - and they will not worry if you make mistakes as long as they can see what you mean. If you need to write Finnish, it will take longer - and you will always need to get important texts checked by a native speaker. We could say that the degree of difficulty depends on the distance between your current proficiency and your final goal.

 

Difficulties

When I started Finnish, I felt that the case endings were a big problem. And the consonant gradation (pöytä - pöydän, liika - liian, and so on). And the various changes that appear when new words are derived from old ones: uida - uimaranta - uintikelpoinen... why not uidaranta, uidakelpoinen, I used to wonder.

On the other hand, it was nice that there were no articles to worry about; and no gender; and not many verb tenses.

Now, 30 years later, I still make mistakes, especially when writing Finnish. Objects appear in the wrong case (although I think I know the rules in principle), a and ä get mixed up; I make more typing errors in Finnish than in English, and type much more slowly. But I have learned to avoid complex structures where I´m pretty sure something will go wrong if my internal monitor is not concentrating.

When reading Finnish, or translating from it, complex contracted sentence structures (participle structures) are sometimes still a problem, expecially if there is a whole string of them, like this example:
* Komissio suorittaa tutkimuksen Välimerellä ilmasta käsin luotaamiseen käytettyihin laitteistoihin yhdistetyillä pyyntilaitteilla tapahtuvan tonnikalan urheilukalastuksen vaikutuksista.
(Translation: The Commission will carry out a study of the effects of the recreational fishing of tuna fish with equipment linked to sounding apparatus used from the air in the Mediterranean.)

Maybe even Finns find this kind of style hard going... (This example actually comes from a book called Finnish for Translators, by Anneli Lieko, Leena Silfverberg and myself, which is due out later this year. It takes a look at Finnish from the point of view of people who have to translate or interpret out of it into their native language.)

 

Finnish is situation-centred

It´s the fact that Finnish is so different from Indo-European languages that makes it so fascinating. One of the special features of the language that I have noticed is its "situation-centredness". By this, I mean the Finnish tendency to describe events and actions in terms of situations. Here´s an example, from the newspaper report of an ice-hockey match:
* Kamppailusta ei puuttunut tilanteita ja jännitystä.
Now ask yourself how you would say that in, say, English. "There was no shortage of situations?" Hardly. More like: "there were lots of exciting moments", or "there was a lot of dramatic action". In other words, English would highlight the dynamic aspect, not the static one. I think this is rather typical of Finnish, and even of the way Finns think, the way they see the world. Psychologists might call this a "field-dependent" way of cognition: that is, there is a tendency always to look at the big picture, to see things as a whole, rather than as isolated details. Next time you watch a football or ice-hockey match on TV, count the number of times the commentator says "tilanne". Here´s another example, from some material studied by a student of mine. In the French advertising brochure for the new Renault Mégane, a headline says:
* Qui n´a jamais rêvéde se sentir libre comme l´air?
Literally: "Who has never dreamed of feeling oneself free as the air?" When this brochure was translated into Finnish, the translator instinctively changed this to:
* Avaruutta ja tilaa, jossa voit oleskella, miten haluat.
Literally: "Space and space, where you can exist how you want." Are these the corresponding Finnish values? Space where you can exist: a situation, not an action. Back to the womb?

 

To be is enough

A related curiosity is the way you can use the verb "olla" in Finnish. The following dialogue is quite acceptable, and indeed typical:
* "Terve, miten meni viikonloppu?" (´Hi, how was the weekend?´)
"No, me vaan oltiin, ei mitään erikoista." (´Well, "we just were", nothing special.´)
Just "being" seems to be enough in Finnish. But not in English or other Indo-European languages, as far as I know. Compare the way one might answer in English: "oh, we didn´t DO anything special."

 

Hiding the agent

The Finnish tendency to highlight a state of being rather than a personal action is also apparent in the way Finnish writers refer to agents - or actually how they avoid referring to agents. Instead of saying that Andersson missed the seminar, they say
* Seminaari jäi Anderssonilta väliin.
Very literally: "The seminar remained between from Andersson" - as if it was the seminar itself that was doing something. Then there is the Finnish preference for the passive, especially in written Finnish:
* Seminaaria varten kokoonnuttiin hotellin lisä-siipeen ja päiväohjelman jälkeen siirryttiin terassille vaihtamaan mielipiteitä epämuodollisemmin. Illalla rentouduttiin hotellin sauna- ja ravintola-tiloissa.

(Translation: The seminar participants gathered in the extra wing of the hotel, and after the day´s programme they moved to the terrace to exchange views more informally. The evening was spent relaxing in the hotel sauna and restaurant.)

The Finnish passive is really an impersonal form which allows the speaker to hide the agent: the subject of a passive verb is left unspecified, as in French "on" or German "man". After all, why stress a human agent, since a person is only a tiny lump of bacteria in the middle of the vastness of nature...?

 

No subject?

Yet another strange thing about Finnish is the difficulty of applying the term "subject" to some structures. Here is a simple passive sentence:
* Pekka vietiin vankilaan (´Pekka was taken to prison / someone took Pekka / they took Pekka...´)
Where is the subject? Is it expressed in the verb ending (some unspecified person), or is Pekka actually the subject, since Pekka is in the nominative? And what about this one:
* Minun täytyy tehdä se. (´I must do it.´)
Is "se" the subject (in the nominative)? Or the whole phrase "tehdä se"? Or do we have a genitive subject ("minun")? Or is there no subject? Maybe we should stop thinking in terms of "subject" altogether...

 

Metatext

The last special feature I will mention here is the Finnish use of metatext. Metatext is text about text, signposts like "firstly, however, in conclusion, as we saw in section 4, we shall return to this in chapter 5, finally I would like to make three points..." These signposts help to orient readers, to let them know what is coming next and to remind them of what was said before, and to show the logical links between different parts of the text.

Languages differ in the ways they use metatext. In her study of academic writing, Anna Mauranen has shown that Finnish writers use much less metatext than e.g. English writers, and that this is something that may make their English texts hard to read. You might say that native English writers tend to value a reader´s time, and so they try to make the text as easy as possible for the reader to understand - as if they were writing advertisements. Finnish writers, on the other hand (like German and Japanese writers), tend to value the reader´s intelligence: they assume that the reader will have the interest and patience to read slowly, and that the reader does not need a lot of extra guidance - this would be patronizing, they feel. So they write texts that are more like poems than advertisements.

 

Language diversity

Finnish is different, yes. You can think differently in Finnish. For the survival of human culture, language diversity is surely just as valuable as biological diversity.

A suggestion for further reading: Mauranen, Anna 1993. Cultural differences in academic rhetoric:
a textlinguistic study. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.

Andrew Chesterman«s article is based on a Studia Generalia lecture