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Comment by efficax | Hacker News Reader

Finnish (and Hungarian) are part of their own linguistic group (Finno-Ugric languages). They both basically have no cognates with the Indo-European language group (which includes not only the Germanic languages like English and German but also the Romance languages and languages like Hindi and Persian, all of which are more similar to each other than they are to Finnish or Hungarian).

Basically, Finnish and Hungarian are the hardest European languages to learn for non-native speakers, almost without comparison.

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And don’t forget Estonian in the Finno-Ugric group. It’s kind of like a redneck version of Finnish in my experience, while Hungarian feels totally unrelated to a Finnish noob like me.

Hungarian and the other Finno-Ugric languages have diverged thousands of years ago. They share some basic words from the hunter-gatherer time (heart, water, fish etc...), but this is apparent only for linguists as the writing and pronunciation has diverged a lot.

Since then, hungarian language got a strong and more recognizable influence from turkic/slavic/germanic languages.

Those two, and Basque, I've wondered a lot about. Hungarian, presumably deriving from the Huns, goes back to pre-historic Central Asia, possibly as far east as Mongolia or Siberia. Finish, I'm not as sure of the consensus provenance. And Basque? Who in the world knows? Possibly some kind of pre-Celtic holdout, I've seen it posited.

This laymans though is that it has come from the sami, as they seem oddly similar in sound. And i have noticed that along the siberian coastline there are peoples that have a culture with surface similarities to the sami.

Hungarians have nothing to do with Huns. They're Magyars, which was a different population in Eastern Europe/the Uralic regiom. "Hungarian" itself does not come from "Hun", the etymology is different. In many countries, such as mine, it's easier to spot the difference since their name is either Ungur (notice the missing H) or Maghiar.

The origin of the population is unclear before they were in the Uralic region.

Although they're "unique" I'm not sure that necessarily makes them harder to learn.

Compare Finnish to a language such as Polish with many cases, and Polish always comes out "harder".

I'm biased as I have moved to Finland, and am (slowly) trying to learn the language. It is hard, but at the same time I'm not sure that learning grammar/words would have been easier if it had been related to another language that I also didn't speak!

The FSI rates Finnish as harder than Polish for native English speakers.

I think the variance among grammars is smaller than variance among vocabularies. Just take any two romance languages. Their grammars will be much more similar than their vocabularies are. This, I think, suggests that a large part of the difficulty involved in learning a new language is actually due to changes in vocabulary. Trying to learn a language with completely different words seems like a Stroop task on steroids.

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