Many, many years ago this song got me into folk metal which has been my favourite genre for the last decade and a half.

I knew there were some ¨'s sprinkled in, but felt it was safer my way than to botch it up even more, heh. (Could've googled it, but that's less fun).

I've visited Finland a lot the later years due to my company starting a fulfillment center there. It was quite interesting how well I could get by with my Norwegian most places. Either because signage also was in Swedish, words often similar enough (except those that are very very far off, lol), or I even could speak Norwegian to some coworkers that then replied in Swedish (and not all of them even being Finns with Swedish as their native language).

Hoitoaine is actually two words, “hoito” = treatment + “aine” = substance.

So you know a bit more Finnish than you thought!

Ukko is also the god of thunder in Finnish mytology

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukko

> - Stendari (fire mage) is "cigarette lighter" (slang)

From Swedish "tändare".

- Stevari (holy temple guardian) is "mall cop" (slang)

From STV (Suomen Teollisuuden Vartiointi) security firm.

"Head city" is just the literal meaning of "capital city".

"Maailma", on the other hand, is an old word, and its original meaning was more like "earth and sky". "Ilma" used to mean things like sky, heaven, air, and weather, but Finnic languages eventually started using the Indo-European loan "taivas" for the first two.

That can go wrong too. They (the guardians of language, prim and proper) tried to make "swap file" be "heittovaihtotiedosto", literally "thrown replacement record collection". Thrown as in the things being swapped are in the air while being exchanged, not placed somewhere temporarily. In the real world, lots of computer-related terminology ended up being just transliterated from English directly, along the lines of procedure -> proseduuri, server -> serveri, icon -> ikoni.

Belonging here: puu = tree

Absolutely, think "lick" vs "leak". I think the author means Hungarian maybe uses very similar looking letters to denote this (ie "lik" and "lík").

In Hungarian also every vowel comes in pairs of short-long: a-á (what vs high), e-é (ever vs eight), "o-ó" (moss vs most), "u-ú" (put vs you), "ö-ő" (fur vs ... well long version has no English equivalent I think but German does: schön).

This is an important sign when someone who is not Italian speaks Italian. The double consonant, for example in the word bello/a, indicates a longer “l” sound, but English speakers in particular do not hear the longer sound and therefore pronounce it as belo/a. Or, when they are told about the longer sound, they pronounce it in a caricatured way as bellllo/a.

Sure does! “Beach” and “bitch” differ only in vowel length in some accents, IME.

Vowel length is generally not semantically significant in English. Vowels are lengthened before voiced consonants, for example, and we don’t even think about it. Compare “cab” and “cap”. As noted here, some Hungarian vowels, such as ’a’ and ‘e’ do change sound when lengthened, but some don’t. Those are the ones that are harder to distinguish for speakers of languages like English.

Only some dialects of English have contrastive vowel length.

The joke goes: There are 3 kinds of people

The pessimist says: Finnish is too hard for an adult to learn, mission impossible.

The realist says: With 10 years of hard work, it's doable.

The optimist says: I can do it in 5 years.

Myself I was an optimist and I kind of did it in 5 years, but it was tight. However, after having spoken it daily for 25 more years I get more and more pessimistic: There are several aspects I will not master in this life.

IMO the hardest parts of learning a new language as an adult is

a) convincing yourself its worth the effort: almost every time an adult runs into a confusing element of a new language, they find themselves calculating how many people in the world speak this language, probability they don't speak english and likelihood of running into this person and circumstance, and it's easy to justify giving up and moving on

b) avoiding forcing it into the framework of your first language: if you have one distinctly favored language already, it's very hard not to try shove the new language you are learning into the former's mold, and this can be counterproductive in learning most languages that don't share an ancestor with your favored one.

a) is greatly mitigated by forcing yourself to be in said context by living in a place prioritizing that language. b) is greatly mitigated by already being bilingual+ with languages from distinct origins (eg: mandarin chinese and english) before learning a new one, so you can place the new language on a spectrum with the ones you already know instead of confined by the rules of just one.

I think this is literally just a function of time and exposure oppirtunity and nothing else.

An adult studying a language is spending like maybe 1% of the time studying that a child learning a language spends.

Well.. I didn't really get proficient in English until I was in my thirties. I learned another language around that time as well, though not to full fluency (only because the option of continuing went away). And absorbing and understanding of German too.. The actual point is only that I remember how it felt - how listening and other kind of input molded my brain, relatively quickly (and sounds and words started echoing around in my brain). Now, thirty years later, it feels like my brain is much stiffer and everything takes much longer, when it comes to injecting a language (fortunately everything else still works as it should).

So, 'adult' isn't really right in my opinion / experience - I know many people who were adults and could absorb another language relatively easily.

What seems to happen is that it does change for the worse as the decades go by. But it's not as simple as adult vs child. And it's not by orders of magnitude in any case, it's more linear than that.

If you have learned a few languages when young, learning another language as an adult is much easier.