Wavyhill

Also, Finnish has some fucking brilliant words.

Poronkusema - the distance a reindeer can walk without pissing.

Pilkunnussija - Grammar Nazi - literally, Comma Fucker.

Thanks for doing this AMA - it's very brave of you.

Who, in your opinion, would win in a fight between a honey badger and a gibbon?

Have you ever found a house or flat that's been a proper time capsule - ie, unchanged since the 1970s / 1960s etc?

Finnish student here.

The biggest challenge is that you can't always directly translate English to Finnish, you kind of have to think about the concept you want to express, and built it from the ground up.

You have a lot of stem words and bolt on endings to mutate their meaning. The position of a word in a sentence changes the meaning too.

So you get puhua - to speak

You drop the -a to get the stem (puhu-) and then the fun begins:

Minä puhun suomea - I speak Finnish

Sinä puhut suomea - You speak Finnish

So far, so easy - there are your conjugations. -n / I, -t / you, -u / he or she, -mme / we, -tte / you (plural), -vat / they.

But if you want to say Do you speak Finnish? then you need the interrogative particle: -ko.

So you bolt it onto the end: Puhu- + t + ko and change the word order:

Puhutko sinä suomea?

And so it goes on. There is a LOT to remember but once you get around your head that it's all case-based with no prepositions or articles, it becomes a memory exercise.

TL;DR - It's a challenging language but once you learn the rules, it's not actually that hard.

Have you read The Bridge by Iain Banks? It's the story of a guy who is in a coma, and it has eerie parallels to your experience.

I'm happy you are on the road to recovery!