Generally, when a foreign person who hasn't lived here for several years tried to speak (Flemish) Dutch, it usually goes like this: foreign person tries, usually messes up pretty hard, Flemish person automatically defaults to English or the foreigner's language (it's very common for Flemish to speak 1 or more foreign languages, usually French and/or English).)
(Flemish) Dutch, while not an easy language, is supposedly not an exceptionally hard one either. But non-natives seem to have the hardest time speaking it. I suppose that partly because, unlike bigger languages like French, Spanish or German, people generally have little or no exposure to it through media and such, so they go in without having any idea of how it's supposed to be pronounced.
(Flemish) Dutch, while not an easy language, is supposedly not an exceptionally hard one either. But non-natives seem to have the hardest time speaking it. I suppose that partly because, unlike bigger languages like French, Spanish or German, people generally have little or no exposure to it through media and such, so they go in without having any idea of how it's supposed to be pronounced.
That's not unique to Finnish tho. German has the same trait. Dutch technically does too, since there is no grammatical rule really preventing you from just slapping on more nouns, but in practice it's only very rarely done.bartholen said:See, in finnish you can basically create insanely long words by just sticking them together.