You know more Finnish than you think

Modern Finnish, Finglish, and IT Vocabulary

• Commenters note heavy contemporary English influence in Finnish IT: many simply use English terms or lightly “Finnicized” forms (e.g., printteri, serveri), despite creative native coinages like ikikiersiö.
• Some dislike localized Finnish UIs: terminology is inconsistent, translations can be nonsensical, and error messages without codes are hard to search.
• Others appreciate well-formed native terms such as hajautus for “hashing,” and admire Finnish compound formation (maailma, verkkokauppa, etc.), though some official neologisms (e.g. for “swap file”) are seen as overdone.

Loanwords and Language Contact Across Languages

• Thread broadens to Uralic and Japanese: most post–Stone Age tech terms in Uralic are loans; Japanese has huge layers of Sino-Japanese vocabulary plus modern Western loans in katakana.
• Some “new” Sino-Japanese terms were coined to translate Western scientific/philosophical ideas and later re-entered Chinese.
• Examples from Portuguese→Japanese, Dutch→Japanese (“beer”), Slavic marketplace → Finnish Turku illustrate long-range contact.
• Debate over whether “most” Japanese loanwords are from English versus overwhelmingly older Chinese loans.

Difficulty of Finnish and Adult Language Learning

• Multiple anecdotes: foreigners in Finland finding Finnish “doable but very difficult”; others failing despite years in-country.
• Finnish described as highly synthetic with many cases and dozens of declension types; very different from Indo‑European patterns.
• Some argue adult language learning difficulty is mostly time/exposure; others emphasize age‑related brain plasticity, with debate over whether the child/adult divide is a hard cutoff or a gradient.
• Motivation, need for immersion, and the tendency to force new languages into the mold of the first language are cited as major adult obstacles.
• Bilingual/multilingual children (e.g., in Switzerland) handle Finnish alongside several other languages with little trouble, reinforcing “use it early or lose it.”
• Emotional and cultural reasons for transmitting Finnish to children are highlighted, independent of practicality.

Phonology and “Knowing More Than You Think”

• Length contrasts in vowels and consonants (Finnish, Hungarian, Italian) are hard for English speakers; extended subthread debates how Hungarian “short–long pairs” are best analyzed.
• Several small anecdotes (game enemy names, consumer labels, folk songs, swear words, compounds like kalsarikännit) illustrate how non-Finns passively absorb bits of Finnish vocabulary and structure.