Everybody theoretically speaks Swedish, at least enough to say "Jag kan inte tala svenska." (I can't speak Swedish, in Swedish). Yet, almost everyone speaks MUCH better English than they speak Swedish; enough so that when I need to speak with native Swedish speakers (which is quite rare anyway, since most of them can speak Finnish too) I usually end up conversing in English, and I'm certainly not the only one.
It is common joke to call English "kolmas kotimainen" (3rd domestic). The idea behind the joke is that while Finnish and Swedish are the official languages, the amount of people able to speak semi-fluent English is several times bigger than the amount of people that speak conversational Swedish. In fact, it's hard to find someone who doesn't speak any English at all.
It might be a joke in Finland, but here in Estonia, there have even been some politics who're serious about it.
Yep. In German, it isn't the phonetics that make it a difficult language, it's the grammar. Where English has "the", German has "der", "die", and "das" depending on the gender of the subject spoken about - which, when it comes to inanimate objects or animals, is everything but obvious. (A table and a dog is male, a lamp and a cat are female, a house and a rhino are neuter...)
And that's only the beginning of it.
Right you are. Although it isn't especially hard to study the words with articles, using them trying to get a grammatically correct sentence, is quite hard.
That said, while Quenya (that Tolkien's elvish language) share many grammatic principles, all words and declinations are totally different. One of the things that Tolkien followed is expressing the subject in the inflection of the verb: in Finnish for example, saying "Min? olen" (I am) is equivalent to simply saying "Olen" since that form of the verb "olla" already carries the information that the subject is in 1st person. In written language the pronouns are dropped quite often, in spoken language rarely.
Actually, I would explain it this way: you can leave out "min?", because you couldn't use "olen" with any other pronoun. Same in English, alhough it's probably not grammatically correct to leave out "I" from "I am", I still do it, when I need to express myself really fast (I can't stand acronyms or worser, writing something like "RUK" instead of "are you okay?"), however I can't do it with "you are", since "are" could be used with "we" or "they". You can use "olet" without "sin?" too, I think.
Now, about those dialects. When you move to a bigger city from the countryside, no one could probably understand you, when you talked the dialect you used to. But it sounds just right, and if you talked how you wrote, all the charm of speaking natural and colorful would disappear behind stammering.
. The stronger accents include Limburgs (south-east of country, where I was born and even I can't understand some of them), Twents (the east-center piece, they are incomprehensible) and the northern sites (Gronings and Fries being the most common ones). One of them (Fries) is also an official language, but nobody really cares about the language except for those that either live there or that speak it.
