In Finnish, the letter 'ä' denotes the vowel [æ], which is close to the vowel you'd use in the words 'cat' or 'hat' in English.
This sound, to my knowledge, doesn't exist in Standard German.
31 karma · joined September 19, 2011
This sound, to my knowledge, doesn't exist in Standard German.
It's true that Finnish spelling is very simple. The mapping of sounds to letters is quite regular, and much more so than in English. As an example, the word 'computer' is 'tietokone'. The pronunciation is [tietokone].
As a result, a "spelling bee" is a completely foreign concept in Finland. A Finnish spelling bee would go on for days.
The grammar of Finnish, on the other hand, is very irregular and full of exceptions. There are 16 noun cases. This makes Finnish laborious for English-speakers to learn.
It's still a little rough around the edges and a lot of obvious things are missing. (I'm partly submitting this now for the added motivation to finish it up.) Looking forward to your feedback.
I've been working on a news solution of my own, Scoopinion, since 2011. It's a discovery engine that ranks articles based on how closely they've been read. Users install a browser extension that lets them track their own reading (within a set of whitelisted sites). It's a little bit of quantified self for news. The data is used for recommendations and to help journalists in their work.
It's not a drop-in replacement for Reader since you don't get the full firehose of headlines from your feeds, only the most engaging stories.
I've also found that some people read way too much into how well an automatic recommendation system should work. There have been a couple of angry feedback messages due to a guess being off.