That’s right, they belong to another language family. One of my Ma’s best friends is from Finland, she always claims that Finnish is easier than Swedish because the Swedish language have to many stupid spelling rules and makes everything more complicated than it is.
And maybe she’s right.
The Amish people in Us uses some kind of old German too don’t they?
Yes they do. The Americans tend to refer to them as the Pennsylvania Dutch… even though they’re speaking a kind of old German. Their English-speaking neighbours must have assumed that “Deutsch” meant “Dutch”… 
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From a purely “linguist” point of view, Finnish and Hungarian are considered to be in the Finno-Ugric group, that also includes Estonian (a dialect of Finnish), though how much they’re actually related is the subject of some debate.
Basque, however, is on its own !
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Oh, I know what it says… I think.
I’m pretty sure (thanks to Google) that it says “This door closes automatically in 10 seconds”.
Here is the text:
Ovi sulkeutuu automaattisesti 10 s kuluttua
Has anyone linked the poem The Chaos yet? Native speaker and it still kinda breaks my brain.
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Actually, there is a much better one available…
Believe me, from the point of view of a professional interpreter / translator, this site does a MUCH better job.
Ismo makes us proud! 
I’ve heard that !
I remember when I was at University in the Soviet Union, there was a group of Estonian students.
They weren’t too happy about being forced to learn Russian, but they were happy to speak English with my group and myself (all Canadians). Before speaking with them, I hadn’t been aware of the fact that Estonian is a dialect of Finnish. They told me exactly what you said, that Estonians can often understand Finnish, but Finns have a lot more trouble with Estonian.
Nice one. Mind boggling indeed. Never heard of it, but now I do. Interesting aside -to me- is that the Dutch author worked for the same Amsterdam weekly as my dad, though in earlier years.
@anon27700620 Your mother’s from Südtirol by any chance?
no, in the Sud Tyrol, people just speak regular German.
My mum is from Friuli, where they speak Friulan, a language unrelated to Italian, which Italian can’t generally can’t understand at all.
This has become one of my favorite threads…anyone have knowledge of native Mexican languages, per chance? I spent several months living in Oaxaca with the Zapotecan people, for whom Spanish is a second language typically, and where their Zapotec language varies significantly from village to village still. It is not a written language, either, though while I was there I met a woman who was working on a Spanish/Zapotec dictionary. This was back in 2001 or 2…perhaps the dictionary has been completed. I really enjoyed learning bits of their language, but I only remember a few words nowadays, and it was unrelated to any other language that I even know vaguely. Fascinating stuff. I’ll have to dig up my journal from that trip where I wrote words and phrases phonetically that I learned. Lovely people and traditions.
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I have been cycling in Sudtirol a couple of times (best cycling area in Europe) , stayed in Alta Badia (Abtei) where they are trilingual, they speak German, Italian and their own language Ladin, which has the same Vulgar-Roman roots as Friulan and Romansh.
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Well, I can’t speak Friulan (other than a few words here and there), but I can understand it to some extent. As such, it surprises people here (I live in Switzerland) when I tell people that I can understand some Romansch because of the similarity to Friulan.
I’m moving back to Italy (near Turin) in a few months, and I’m thinking about trying to find a place to learn some Friulan.
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That must have been pretty cool.
I think that Friulian has a more or less written form now, although there is a big north / south Friulian divide, apparently.
Correction ! After a bit of investigating, I’ve discovered the Friulian does indeed have a codified writing system.
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If someone who speaks two languages is bilingual and someone who speaks three languages is trilingual, what is someone who speaks one language?
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American! 
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You clearly haven’t met enough Japanese, French or Italian people !!
I don’t know about other people, but I can tell you from personal experience that those three groups are (barring exceptions, of course) not really big on learning foreign languages.
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That’s what I was told by the Estonians themselves.
Hence, they found it not too difficult to understand Finnish, but the other way was more difficult. Maybe you didn’t hear much about Estonian because it was (stuck) behind the Iron Curtain ?
Swedish is still in the Indo-European group, and related to other languages in its group. Finnish isn’t in the Indo-European group, so I think / suspect that it would be more difficult to learn. I would have my doubts about Swedish being more difficult than Finnish (to which it isn’t related), just as Hungarian is probably more difficult to learn than German (to which it isn’t related), and Basque is probably more difficult than French OR Spanish (to which it isn’t related).
Just my opinion, however.
Never having been to Estonia, I certainly wouldn’t know, and have only to base myself on what I remember being told by the students at the time.
There was another student, from Karelia, and she certainly LOOKED Scandinavian, rather than Slavic. She too told me that in her part of Russia, people speak / understand Finnish… although that was apparently quite a no-no in the Soviet days.
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As a Dutch native speaker, Finnish and Hungarian, as well as Basque are totally foreign to me. German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Frysian, Afrikaans, Luxembourgish, English to a certain extent, Icelandic I have no idea about, Yiddish a little bit, and a whole bunch of regional Germanic languages I can understand some and probably learn easier than languages from another language group because I learned to speak a Germanic language as a child myself. I have no idea how hard it would be to learn a Germanic (or an Indo-European one for that matter) language as compared to learning, for example, Finnish, if my mother tongue was, again for example, the native American Zapotec @RosaCanDo was talking about.
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