# Reading Finnish slowly



## AutumnOwl

I don't know if this is the right place for this question, but here it goes. Even if I'm a native Finn and have Finnish as my mother tongue, I've gone to school in Sweden and Finnish have always been more of a spoken language for me rather than a written one. I've noticed that I read a Finnish text more slowly and have to re-read words sometimes and analyze (chop them up in smaller pieces) to understand them in a way that I don't have to when it comes to Swedish, English or French, where I can skim the text and still understand its meaning. I would guess that it has to do with the fact that Finnish is an agglutinative language. Do others who doesn't have Finnish as their first (written) language have the same feeling that they have to analyze Finnish words in a way that isn't needed when it comes to for example Swedish and English? I don't have any problems with having to think about what is said when it comes to spoken Finnish, whether I speak it myself or listen to spoken Finnish.


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## Ketutar

I would say it's mostly a question of practice, and that you read the other languages more than Finnish. 
It could also be that the other languages are Indo-European and have a rather simple construction, and Finnish is not... perhaps. It might be easier to recognize the different grammatical parts in a spoken language than written one.
My cousins, who grew up in Sweden, don't read Finnish, because they are used to read certain letter combinations in a certain way - like "ou" is "uu"... that might make it harder for you too. Swedish, English and French are not written as they are spoken, Finnish is.


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## pearho

When it comes to news and similar topics, I find Finnish more difficult to read than to listen to, even though reading gives me time to go back and figure out the meaning of difficult words and convoluted phrases. The reason may be that written Finnish more easily lends itself to a more complicated word order that is less intuitive to somebody with a background in Germanic and Romance languages.


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