This whole discussion makes me happy that I’m learning Icelandic from a degreed linguist rather than someone whose only qualification is simply speaking the language… I suppose different teaching methods work better for different people, and that in most cases it doesn’t really matter how you refer to various grammatical features as long as you know how to use them correctly, but as a professional linguist myself I find I can learn languages much faster if the teacher introduces grammatical structures by their “proper” (i.e., as used by linguists) name. That way I know right away what function the structure has, rather than have to figure it out on my own by interpreting the teacher’s vague circumlocutions or parsing a large number of possibly incomplete examples.

Anyhow, people can even say “English has no future.” which is sort of correct. But it isnt even really true. Because the “will” or “going to” used to state the future are far different from the present continuous used to state the same thing. Just because we use an auxialliary verbs or modals to state times, does not mean they are not a tense. Past perfect for example is clearly a completely different thing from past simple. It is another tense.

So I repeat, if Finnish is good because it doesn’t have a future tense, then English is just as good, because it doesn’t have one either. But by the same metric, Chinese is even better, because it doesn’t have any tenses at all! All temporal information in Chinese is expressed in adverbs.

But to add what Brendan said, the one really cool thing featured in some dialects in English is the triple modal. But I might should oughta go to bed, even if I useta stay awake longer…

I’m afraid my “Why Finnish is better than Hungarian” list would consist of only one item: I can speak it. :-)

Karen: totally with you there!

sbalb: you might want to take a look at the selkouutiset, YLE news broadcast in plain Finnish. It might be useful in training your ear for Finnish — it’s a daily news broadcast (available as podcast) in Finnish intended for people who don’t speak it as a first language; it uses simple language that is spoken more slowly and clearly than usual.

Does anyone know of good resources for taking a working-but-rusty knowledge of basic Finnish and turning it into actual comprehension of the written and spoken language? An equivalent of the BBC’s marvellous News in Welsh with vocabulary hints would be ideal. A fast trainline all the way from Paris to Tallinn would be even better, as we don’t fly any more and miss Helsinki.