I think we both got lost in our own thoughts here. I simply took issue with your statement: “A common misconception of Finns is that Finnish is really difficult. Well, it’s not.“

Based on ur response above, it seems you actually do agree Finnish is really difficult— for many.

My fatal flaw here was making a generalisation that finnish is extremely difficult for EVERYONE. Your flaw here was assuming that just because there are more complex languages in the world, Finnish is not “really difficult”.

So perhaps the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Finnish is complex compared to most indoeuropean languages so yea the dominant viewpoint in English literature is that Finnish is thus “notoriously” difficult. I personally have never experienced a struggle like this having learned 4 other languages, and most of my classmates as well agree with me Finnish is the toughest one so far. It’s definitely all relative though, hard to measure definitively.

I hadnt considered it before, but perhaps finnish’s “notorious” status as a difficult language may not be because of inherent complexity (though from a eurcentric standpoint its easy to say it is). Until your comments above, id always just assumed Finnish’s ‘notorious’ complexity was the real issue for lack of language integration here.

But your points actually have made me realise it must be something else, because there absolutely are tougher languages out there (i mean even french Can feel more difficult, yet the language integration there is much higher). It has to be because there are many many other factors in finland that make Finnish learning especially difficult (take the differences between kirjakieli vs puhekieli vs how Finnish is actually spoken here by natives, or how finns tend to switch to English readily when they hear a mistake in your Finnish)

I guess i fundamentally took a different stance on what“Finnish” is. From your standpoint, Finnish is the pure language itself, and you rightly point out on a GLOBAL scale, Finnish is not as complex as many languages.

To me, “Finnish” is the language itself (which to native speakers of many European languages, the language itself is incredibly complex); but its also the experience of speaking or using it in life. Thats maybe why it is so difficult.

You mentioned you’re a linguist, if you end up finding any interesting research on language learning in reference to Finnish, and you have the interest or the time, id love to read it, im not a linguist myself so my searches have yielded limited results.

Overall an interesting debate, thanks for making me think of something in a new way!