I stand corrected and must admit Im surprised by this. English is such natural occurence in our every day life in nordic countries that it should not be a problem to understand. My experience is that even if you almost fail it at school you have enough basics down to get by in english speaking countries.
Yeah, but it must be remembered that Finnish is a very unique language. Looking at like Swedish, German and English so much have at least the same origin. Its basically rare that a word in English or German have no meaning whatsoever in Swedish. Just take the sentence I just wrote: (i)
basically isn't a word in Swedish, but bas means base and so forth. You can figure out what it means.; (ii)
rare isn't a word in Swedish, but "raritet" (rarity) is, so its not that hard to figure out, (iii)
word is "ord" in Swedish, just remove the "w", easy to learn, (iv)
have is har, similar, (v)
no is close to our "nej", (vi)
meaning is a perfect example of the challenge a Swede face when learning English. We cannot use "meaning" at all in this context, different words would be used, but when saying
what do you mean? we use the word "menar". The word
sentence is "mening" in Swedish. So all you got to do is to take a word used in one perspective in Swedish and learn what context its used in English, where it more or less have the same meaning. At the most there are some false friends, the Swedish word "eventuell" doesn't mean eventually, it more like
potentially.
Finnish is totally different. Its like learning Chinese, almost...
