They are much smaller than the Russia. Even if they do the same thing, the scale is unavoidably different.

That’s a surprising claim.

How would that happen?

Duolingo had extremely good grammar lectures for many languages, hidden under a “hints” button underneath each learning node. And then Duolingo went and deleted all of that information, making the “hints” button essentially useless and nullifying hundreds of hours of work volunteers had put into writing the grammar lectures there! Finnish is one of the languages where the volunteer crew had made a seriously big effort writing good quality grammar lectures in the “hints” sections. And then one day: *poof*!

A solution I have found useful with various languages has been figuring out what are the reasons some stuff is done in a very unusual manner. There’s basically always something such a rule allows you to take shortcuts at in some whole other language situation. When you notice that the very weird structure is not used in some situation, you get much more precision in understanding what that means. All languages have things that are ambiguous because the grammar leaves things unsaid. “We are ugly” doesn’t really tell whether you, trolske, are ugly or if it’s only me and a couple other people who are. But there languages where you have a different word for “we” depending on whether it also includes the people being talked to, or not. (Finnish is not one of those languages, though :( )
That’s a rule that is a bit annoying to learn because instead of “I, you, she, we, youse, they” you need to learn “I, you she, we, wo, youse, they”. One extra word. But damn it’s satisfying when you hear “we are ugly” said in that language and know precisely that you are not included! Or “Wo are ugly”, meaning that yes, “wo are indeed ugly, including you.”

When you find out why the complexity exists, your brain stops rebelling against the rule and you will learn what needs to be learned!

What are the most frustrating things about Finnish? I might be able to help you a bit, maybe? :)

In German there are some rules to this:

• All non-living things that end with -e are always feminine. Coffee ends in and -e in German, but is a plant, and therefore living, so that’s why the rule doesn’t apply. But otherwise it applies fully. (Except that “the end” is “das Ende”, and building is “das Gebäude”. But still, the exceptions number in one or two. Otherwise all non living words ending with -e are feminine. “Die Straße” for a street. “Die Dose” for a can.
• Everything with -chen is always neutral. This rule is so stupidly strong that even the word for “girl”, “mädchen” is not feminine. Girls are not female in German because they end with -chen, think about that!

There are other rules as well, but these two are the easiest ones.
Plus there’s the “don’t learn just ‘das Mädchen’. Learn ‘kleines Mädchen’” that I mentioned in another comment above!

The recommended way for remembering words’ genders is to always attach an adjective in front of a word when learning it.

Do not try to learn “die Nacht”.
Learn “stille Nacht”, which means “a quiet night”.
The -e in the word “stille” is there because the word is feminine. When you learn “stille Nacht”, you can automatically recognize it must be “die Nacht”.
Similarly: “Blödes Auto” means “Stupid car”. the ending -es means it’s das Auto.
And “Blöder Mann” means “stupid man”. -er, because it’s der Mann.

Same works in other languages as well. Buen viño = Good wine. Therefore: El viño. Persona rapida = A fast person. -a means it’s la persona.

Because a native speaker of German often hears adjectives in combination with words when they learn them, they automatically constantly receive the necessary information on the words’ genders.

There’s other stuff hinting about what to expect in the end of the sentence: Because there is the question word “Could?”, you know you need to wait until the needed verb arrives. You will of course already encounter a verb at “tell”, but it’s clear that something more is still to come.

In Dutch and German (but not in Scandinavian languages!) it works in a much less clear way: “I have a book” is a complete sentence. There’s nothing making it clear that there must be still more words coming. In your English phrase the sentence feels incomplete if you leave out the last word. But in Dutch they say “I have a book needed” when they want to say “I need a book”. A foreigner hears “I have a book” and then gets surprised by the “needed” still coming up. In English you get a clear warning that something is missing. In Dutch you don’t. You kind of don’t, that is.

Because actually you do: In spoken Dutch you will eventually learn to recognize the intonation pattern that tells whether the sentence is at its end or not. There is a certain melody and stress pattern that you can hear going on, and at the point of “I have a book” the sound of the phrase sounds such that your brain expects more to be coming up. And in written text your brain sees that the sentence still continues. So, in the end this is a beginner level problem. A person living in the Netherlands will quickly learn to subconsciously recognize the intonation and stress patterns. At least that’s what happened to me when I moved to Germany where they have the same “problem”.

Woaw, this sounds awesome! Ik moet mijn nederlands verbetern!

This is how it works in German as well. 16 o’clock is called “um 4” in a typical conversational situation.

A stupid thing it’s missing the numbers, though :/

Uh, that sounds as if the game had been developed by EA 🤯

I hadn’t really thought about this part of Smetona’s history.

He’s also the guy who decided to allow Soviet military bases on Lithuania’s territory in 1939 (or 1938?), leading to Soviet Union occupying all of Lithuania in 1940, from those bases. Soviet Union demanded those bases in all four countries that were considered Baltic countries back then. Finland refused. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania agreed. Things evolved from that and now we talk about three Baltic countries.

This decision by Smetona had hefty consequences indeed. Of course, the geography is different for Baltic countries: They are on the way from Central Europe to St. Petersburg. Finland is not.

But still, he’s a guy who made the decision to give Lithuania to Soviet Union. I woudn’t have thought Lithuanians might consider as having been a net-positive for their country.

Ah well… Would be interesting hearing what some actual Lithuanians hold of this. Does for example @dcoderlt@ohai.social have some insight to give here? :)

They were tortured and slaughtered in order to remove their culture and language from the face of Earth.

Killing people is difficult. It was not done for fun. It was done in order to achieve a goal.

No, saying that that goal was monstrous is not “moaning”. And it is extremely disrespectful of you towards the victims of genocides to reduce it to that.

“We’d all be speaking <language> and ____ing nothing but _____” means “we would have been forced to follow the culture of this foreign nation and lose our own.”

The act of forcing people to give up their language and culture for another one has an English word for it: Genocide.

HumanOnEarth was saying that if we had behaved throughout the 1940’s the way we do now, we would have ended up victims of genocide. Nothing in his comment says that there is anything wrong with cabbages or sausages. They are not a problem to him at all. But losing his own cuisine and his own language would be problems for him.

I am surprised if you truly do not understand this and wrote your comment in a good faith.

HumanOnEarth was speaking up against fascism and what you did was to ridicule him. I hope you did so by accident.

Firstly, this reads as you saying “Nazis were okay until 1940 or so, but then they began doing really evil things”

Secondly, this reads as you defending the Russia.

Supporting Nazis or supporting the Russia have no place in this community.
Could you elaborate on these words of yours?

Thank you for the clear reply!

It has something like 100 times as many users as PieFed+Lemmy+Mbin do together.

When starting here, I found it a nice way for finding interesting communities to go to different instances’ pages with my web browser and browsing their Local. A lot of communities I would never have thought of!

So, go to sopuli.xyz and see what their Local has to offer, then go to piefed.social for the same. And suppo.fi and Solarpunk (is it slrpnk.net or what?) and what is there still? Blåhaj at least. You can see what instances interesting commentators are coming from and check out the rest of that instance’s atmosphere by just writing that instance’s address in your browser’s URL bar.

How is it a nightmare that I’m allowed to say “I’m not consenting to this shit”?!

Now they’re planning to revoke that right. Nightmare gone?