Tervetuloa oppimaan suomen kieltä! (Welcome to learn Finnish language!)

Thank you for reading this blog :) If you're willing to learn Finnish language, spoken in Finland, and by minorities in Estonia, Sweden, Russia and the town of Finland in the United States. This first post will deal with the language in general. Following posts will be published frequently enough to not let your skills get worse.
Are you ready :) ? Aloitetaan! (Let's start!)
Finnish has notorious reputation of being a difficult language. But really, is it that much harder than French or Spanish you studied at school :D ? Remember how much time you used with those? Yeah. Despite being part of the same "language family", Indo-European, people still struggle learning languages closely related to their own language. When it comes to Finnish kids learning Finnish, they survive as well as their counterparts in other countries.

Finnish is member of the Finnic group of the Finno-Ugric languages, so it isn't related to the majority of European languages. People often mistakenly think that languages spoken in neighbouring countries must be closely related. For this reason questions like "Is Finnish like Swedish?" are common, and Finns usually are very quick to correct this misconception. So neither Swedish or Russian are related to Finnish, except through lots of loanwords taken in the course of  their long history. The languages related to Finnish are Hungarian, Estonian, Sami and several lesser known languages spoken in Russia.

Thanks to my dear Simona for this amazing chart :D

How long have Finnish speakers populated Finland? According to linguistics, Finno-Ugrian speakers have been living in the area of Finland since at least 3000 BC. The following millenia words were borrowed from  Germanic, Slavic and Baltic languages. One could easily think that if Finnish is filled with loanwords, it shouldn't be that much different. Well, Finnish has been compared very often to a “freezer”, because once a word was borrowed it has changed much less than its original. Classical example of this is Proto-Germanic word "kuningaz" ,which later became what we nowadays know as "king", in Finnish "kuningas".

Hello ol' buddy :D Were you spoken Finnish in your lifetime?

The Finnic languages form a complex dialect continuum (from Southern Estonia to Northern Finland) and Finnish itself has seven dialect areas. Those are characterized by changes in vowels, diphthongs, use of alternative words but are mutually understood by native Finns. Usually. Everyone though understands the standard language (the one I'll teach you).

1) Southwestern dialects 2) Tavastian dialects
3) Southern Ostrobothnian dialects
4)Mid- and Northern Ostrobothnian dialects 
5) Far-Northern dialects  6) Savonian dialects
7) Southeastern language

Finally some features that are very specific to Finnish (and languages related to it).

• Instead of prepositions (in, at, on, to etc.) Finnish uses the system called cases. These correspond often straightforwardly to the prepositions in many situations (location, duration, possession etc.)
• Finnish doesn't have genders, so there's only one personal pronoun to cover both, he and she
• Nor does Finnish have articles (a, an, the in English). When necessary definiteness is indicated by other means. 
• Foreigners are usually amazed by the lenght of Finnish words. This is due to the structure of the language, Finnish is typologically an agglutinative language that allows grammatical markers and endings to join a word stem
• Finnish has a phenomenon called vowel harmony. This restricts the occurrence of some vowels in same non compound word.
• It is often said that the word order in Finnish is very free. Still, the word order in Finnish is not random.  

  Yay! You've just taken your first step to learn a new language. The only way is forward  now on :D!