That's not to say Finnish is an easier language than English -- even if our writing system is strictly superior, as a fenno-ugric language we've got boatloads of other crap that drags us down :).
There's plenty of interesting history in how Finnish got this way. In a nutshell, the protestant reformation hit Finland before there was a written Finnish language. Since everyone being able to read the bible on their own was kind of important for the Lutherans, this posed a problem for the clergy. So, to fix it, one particularly active scribe named Michael Agricola went and defined the basic form of written Finnish on his own. He wanted to make it easy to learn to read, and so made it very simple. However, as spoken Finnish was an old language, much of it didn't fit in the straightjacket of a language he had created. His solution? By then he had become the bishop of Turku, and could pretty much dictate anything church-related in Finland. He chose to simply ignore the parts of the language that didn't fit, and in a few decades spoken Finnish shed the features that couldn't be represented in writing. The end result is probably the simplest writing system anyone anywhere uses as their first language.
This is a lie-to-children that I too was taught in school, but it's not even remotely true. Consider:
herne(k)keitto leu(v)an rei(j)än isän (=m)maa sydäm(m)en
You'd sound like a robot if you just pronounced them "as written". Computer phonetic analysis of the language reveals even more patterns where the written language indisputably deviates from the spoken one, but these at least should be easy to verify without specialist knowledge or equipment.
Here's a long but relatively easy-to-follow article on the subject http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/orto.html (in Finnish).
As the other comment mentioned Finnish isn't that phonetic at all. Even the simple "tervetuloa" is actually pronounced as "tÄrvetuloa".
But out of all languages I've learned/tried to learn, Finnish definitely is relatively more rule-abiding. And it has a huge bonus of being very obscure as to be used as a secret language :)
For example, comparing English and German:
- English has simple plurals. In regular cases you add an s or es, and the number of exceptions is limited. Chair, chairs. Book, books. Jacket, jackets. In German plurals are, for all practical purposes, completely irregular: Stuhl, Stühle. Buch, Bücher. Jacke, Jacken.
- English does not generally have gendered nouns, nor an equivalently complex replacement.
- English does not have cases, nor an equivalently complex replacement.
- As a result of those two, the English words a and an correspond in German to ein, eine, einen, einem, einer and eines.
- English has almost the same tenses as German, but let's take the verb to run in the present tense: I run, you run, he runs, we run, they run. In German, laufen: Ich laufe, du läufst, er läuft, wir laufen, ihr lauft. Rather then two forms, there are five.
- English does not have formality encoded in its grammar.
It's pretty hard to say that German isn't objectively harder than English.
No, instead it's in the vocabulary. ;)
Many of the most basic words of English exist in more formal and less formal versions. Compare horseman and equestrian, or eat and dine, or smell and fragrance, or hug and embrace.
Many of these apparent redundancies derive from the period when Britain was ruled by native French speakers, who tended to use a lot of French- or Latin-derived words.
I certainly wouldn't claim that spoken English doesn't encode plenty of formality:
*Sir, would you care for an aperitif?*
*No, I ain't hungry.*
Also, when you start addressing someone using formal forms it is very hard to switch to informal 'you'. Using these forms affect human thinking and after you have already addressed someone formally (because it was in a professional situation for instance) you are not likely to become friends. In some cultures there is a special complex social protocol for switching from formal 'you' to informal one. This ceremony is sometimes called using a German word 'Bruderschaft' and for some peculiar reason it often involves kissing and drinking alcohol. This, rather unfortunate, photo captures such situation: http://imgur.com/pmf57.jpg
As I find it significantly easier to develop social relationships in English, I often wonder whether this lack of formal 'you' contributes to the economical prosperity of the English-speaking countries (and esp. the even less formal US).
But then, the formal 'you' contributes to professional relationships. Think of it as a safeguard against overstepping an invisible line of proper conduct.
It is really more difficult to say "Sie Arschloch" than "Du Arschloch" because the formal 'you' clashes with vulgar language one would use around drinking buddies.
try{ assert ! relationship.isCustomerOrBoss() say."You asshole!" } catch(VulgarLanguageException e){ say."That's not acceptable." }
The point is that in English the additional semantics do not require additional syntax. To make a programming analogy, this is like the difference between C++ having overloadable operators and Java using methods to achieve the same. C++'s grammar is more complicated than Java's, because C++ uses additional syntax to achieve the same semantic ends.
The dual French / Germanic roots to English vocabulary does however hint at one of its distinctively complicated features: English pronunciation and spelling is bewildering because of that lineage.
I could say that in English and in Chinese, and with effort in German.
The participant here who submitted the article is dubious about any one language being harder than any other language. I was exposed to that doubt as part of the standard dogma of linguistics while studying linguistics, and I have observed difficult features in many of the languages I have studied.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963415
That said, I have also read in the linguistics literature a hypothesis that there is a language-universal process of forming creoles and koineization,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koin%C3%A9_language#Process_of_...
and my educated guess would be that English (having spread around the world, and spoken in the country with the most native speakers, the United States, mostly by people whose traceable ancestors were NOT native speakers of English) might be a more koineized language than, say, Twi. So perhaps on a truly worldwide, pancultural basis, English is somewhat easier to learn to communicate with other speakers of English than most languages are to communicate with other speakers of those languages.
And if you can argue that for Chinese, you could argue it for the romance languages, for English after the Norman invasion, etc.
There’s also I do run, I did run, I will run, I shall run, I can run, I could run, I should run, I must run, I might run, I would run, I may run. And all their negations (“I shouldn’t run” is OK but “I mayn’t run” is not). And the special rules for conjugating them: the past tense of “I run” is “I ran”, but the past tense of “I can run” is “I could run”, not “I canned run” or “I can ran”.
These are not complex to native English speakers because we learned most of them without being formally taught, but an adult learning English as a foreign language is not so lucky.
(I see from Googling that German also has modal verbs; I don’t know if the whole set is easier or harder to learn than the English set, from the point of view of someone who knows neither.)
The funny bit with your example? Despite the similar usage, German complicates things further by splitting the primary and auxiliary verbs, with the primary being transported to the end of the clause:
Ich sollte nach Hause laufen.
Literally:
I should to home run.
This is no coincidence, since English grammar is basically a simplified version of German grammar. There's a clear continuum from German to English via Frisian and Dutch where the grammar is continually simplified relative to its Germanic root. You can see the same sort of progression in the Romance languages. Modern Italian is pretty much uncontroversially simpler than Latin.
The author specifically says he is talking about hard for english speakers, so the new title is correct.
Specifically:
"Languages tend to get “harder” the farther one moves from English and its relatives. Assessing how languages are tricky for English-speakers gives a guide to how the world’s languages differ overall."
and
"A truly boggling language is one that requires English speakers to think about things they otherwise ignore entirely."
as two examples.
On the other hand, you might have a language with difficult basics, but relatively simple mastery once you have the basics down - I don't know enough languages to give an example, but it seems plausible.
So, yes, you'd likely get different results if you're comparing languages at different proficiency levels, but a rough comparison should still be possible.
My impression, as a native English speaker who has learned German, is that German is much more like this than English. You have to know quite a bit to say fairly simple sentences. But once you know the basics, there are only a couple of advanced concepts to get you to mastery.
[maybe this depends on how you learn. My approach was, roughly, first learn to communicate, then learn to communicate correctly]
To correctly form simple German sentences you need to learn 90% of the non-vocabulary elements of the language. To get to mastery, you have to learn the other 10%.
To correctly form simple English sentences you need to learn 10% of the non-vocabulary elements of the language. To get to mastery, you have to learn the other 90%.
Ranking human language complexity is a much more difficult task than you might imagine.
Still, my native language is Romanian, and I found English verbs easier to learn than French conjugation, even though French is very similar to Romanian in the first place.
However I think putting a number on the difficulty of becoming a fluent, capable speaker of any foreign language is much more difficult. I'm not sure if it's any easier for an English speaker to become an idiomatic, witty, eloquent speaker of German than Chinese.