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I consider myself reasonably good with languages so before heading to Finland I tried to learn some Finnish. It turned out to be a rather humbling experience. Finnish is a difficult language to learn for an Indo-European speaker in several different way. First, the grammar is very different, e.g., no prepositions and tons of cases. Second, it’s fairly fusional – the words can’t be easily broken apart into meaningful chunks, you have to learn the combination as a whole. (This makes Finnish harder, for instance, than Japanese, which has somewhat similar grammar, but is purely agglutinative.) But what probably hits you most as a first time visitor is not the grammar, but the fact that the vocabulary is completely different. Even the words that one would expect to be “international” are different in Finnish: “yliopisto” for “university”, “ravintola” for “restaurant”, “tietokone” for “computer”, “puhelin” for “phone”.