I have been learning Finnish for approximately 600 days now. These are my thoughts on the language. I am somewhere in the vicinity of A1 proficiency, so my linguistic analysis should not be given much weight.
The two most obvious differences with languages like English and German are the lack of articles and the lack of gender:
- She is a Finn = Hän on Suomalainen
- He is a Finn = Hän on Suomalainen
This saves both words and time relative to say, German, which pointlessly assigns a gender to pencils and clocks:
- the hotel, the pencil, the clock = das Hotel, der Bleistift, die Uhr
- the hotel, the pencil, the clock = hotelli, kynä, kello.
Not gendering third-person pronouns is both practical and inclusive.
The distinction between "a" and "the" is positional: You have the ticket = Lippu on sinulla I have a ticket = Minulla on lippu
Finnish is strictly phonetic. My friend Mikko says that a spelling bee in Finland would be a hearing test. The good news is that, if one can hear words correctly, one can write them. The bad news is that one has to listen very carefully, because every sound matters. One can turn a meeting into a murder by not making an "a" sound long enough ("tapaan" versus "tapan"). Fortunately, the crime rate in Finland is quite low and the likelihood of confusion here is unlikely.
This is the linguistic equivalent of "duct tape" in Finland. You can use it pretty much anywhere. Ismo explains this here. The literal translation is "well so" but has more inflection-driven versatility than either "well" and "so" in English, although some of the usage patterns overlap. From what I've inferred, "no niin" is a standard way to answer the telephone with familiars.