They said that your language is DIFFERENT, not hard.
How long would it take me to speak and write Finnish fluently?
I'm going to move in Helsinki permanently and leech Kela's financial aid for awhile; although I don't talk too much, I'm going to study for about a year or two first before the planned scenario.
Is it a right decision?
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Anonymous2012-12-16 5:33
Start studying it straight away, you'll need all the preparation you can get. Study the grammar carefully.
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Anonymous2013-01-01 12:40
Move to Stockholm. Swedish is much easier to learn and Sweden doesn't suck as much as Finland.
To answer your question: it depends. What language were you brought up with? Pronunciation is more difficult for native English speakers than it is to Japanese speakers for example. Finnish is notoriously difficult to learn because we have a ton of words you need to mess about with to get them to the correct form.
To be perfectly honest I don't really know any immigrants who have learnt Finnish "fluently". They can get pretty good at it but it's usually not exactly fluent unless you've been raised here.
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Anonymous2013-01-02 2:33
The problem is that Sweden is multicultural, chaotic, and has expensive cost of living. I did a research to all Nordic countries, and most of them don't have any financial leech except Finland. I'm not a native English speaker either, so grinding pronunciation, usage, and grammar don't matter to me as long as I have free money to support myself for the future. 24 years old and I feel getting old, and it left me two hard choices: either I commit suicide without doing anything worthwhile as a good-for-nothing trash or being somehow successful as a working class in the so-called society. Hence, paranoid and don't have any other choices to make. Convincing, no?
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Anonymous2013-01-02 2:40
Also do you have other tips?
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Anonymous2013-01-21 19:29
There's multiculturalism in Finland too. Not nearly as much as Sweden but it's here. The Finnish economy is failing hard because everything is taxed to shit. The Swedes have the same thing but they have a culture of success and actually doing things. Everybody here is chronically depressed and an alcoholic.