Which language is harder? Finnish or Japanese? - The SOV word order of the polysynthetic language?

[Alex Hogendorp]

It took me almost 6 months for me to be near conversational level in Japanese. And then I looked at the comments about someone studying Finnish and he finds it takes him nearly 6 months to be near conversational level in Finnish. So I don't know.

 

[Cherry Eyed Hamster]

Finnish and Japanese are agglutinative, not polysynthetic.

I’d say both languages are equally challenging for a native English speaker. With Japanese you have the three alphabets, subject-object-verb grammar, and all the honorifics one must use depending on the situation they’re in.

With Finnish, the grammar is incredibly complex and has a lot of noun cases to memorize. I’d also say word pronunciations are much more difficult than Japanese.

To weigh in with my own experience: I taught myself Mandarin to a fluent level and have dabbled in several other languages, Japanese included. Japanese was by far the most difficult language for me to grasp, even with a dedicated weekly tutor. I’d love to get back to learning it, but my god it was a Herculean feat when I first tried it. Not sure if I’d be able to tackle it.

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

Finnish and Japanese are agglutinative, not polysynthetic.

I’d say both languages are equally challenging for a native English speaker. With Japanese you have the three alphabets, subject-object-verb grammar, and all the honorifics one must use depending on the situation they’re in.

With Finnish, the grammar is incredibly complex and has a lot of noun cases to memorize. I’d also say word pronunciations are much more difficult than Japanese.

To weigh in with my own experience: I taught myself Mandarin to a fluent level and have dabbled in several other languages, Japanese included. Japanese was by far the most difficult language for me to grasp, even with a dedicated weekly tutor. I’d love to get back to learning it, but my god it was a Herculean feat when I first tried it. Not sure if I’d be able to tackle it.

Thank you for correcting me on this. I think Japanese isn't as hard as people or saying but that's just me. I guess because Japanese is so hard at first but gets much easier near the end I'm predicting. I am also learning Mandarin too.

I also expect Finnish would be much easier to get used to especially after learning any Agglutinative language like how learning Spanish helped me a lot with learning Russian.