March_ts But if I ever want to practice, it's only an hour's drive to Portugal!
You're so lucky to have a foreign country so near to you, and it's only smart that you went for Portuguese ?
About Finnish... well... I wasn't brave or anything, I just had NO clue of what I was getting into! lol I'd heard about the many cases but, to be honest, that wasn't the hardest part. Learning suffixes is not so different from learning prepositions, after all.
The major problems were vocabulary and, of course, speaking.
Vocabulary because, like @ClaudiaBefu rightly said, there are so many vowels. Our teacher told us Finnish is considered the "Italian of the North", because like my language it has so many vowels - and that made it only more frustrating ? Memorizing words in Finnish and distinguish them was truly difficult (that's why I used Memrise).
And speaking - because you cannot truly reach a decent level in a language unless you get to speak it, and there weren't that many Finns in the Bologna area... The only people I know to have achieved a decent grasp of Finnish went and spent some time in the country, for example with the Erasmus programme.
In comparison, learning German was a piece of cake ?
