Finnish is just an "easy, regular" language? Guess again.
This is what a person said about Finnish in Finlandforum (
http://www.finlandforum.org/):
Recently, I started studying Finnish. Now it's starting to drive me a bit crazy. Too much messing around with the words. Conjugation, consonant gradation, partitiivi, genetiivi, verb forms, etc. They make my head spin. Too many rules! Why can they just leave the words alone? Evil or Very Mad
Voi vitsi! Suomea on tosi vaikeaa!
...
In my opinion, the difficulties of learning Finnish are very different from learning Japanese.
With Japanese, you have katakana (okay), hiragana (fine) and kanji (impossible). However, once you've memorised katakana and hiragana and some important kanji characters then you're good to go. The bulk of the remaining work is building your vocabulary and memorizing more kanji.
With Finnish, the alphabet is not a problem. However, there are a million grammatical rules which, in my opinion, is mind boggling. A simple word can mutate into all sorts of different forms depending on usage. So not only do you need to know the words, you also need to know how each word changes.
I know quite a lot of words already but still have trouble reading the newspaper. Some words just transform into something completely different even though it may simply be the past tense form of the word, for example.
Sorry, I don't mean to scare you.