I'm part of the Swedish speaking minority in Finland, and spent 7 years in school trying to learn Finnish. I spent 3 years learning German, and got about as far with that. Or as a friend of mine said who moved to Germany: German just feels like a dialect compared to Finnish.
Swedish and German are very closely related languages, so you probably had tons of implicit intuition about how Germanic languages work that didn’t have to be studied.
Yep, Swedish and German is as closely related as English and German. It's possible that English and German are even closer as they share the same Germanic branch (west Germanic), which Swedish does not share.
I bring this up since it can be easier for the English speaking community of HN to relate to the closeness of German, and for a while consider being "easy as a dialect of English" to understand, in contrast to Finnish which is really difficult.
Random off-topic question: do people in your group (Swedish speakers from Finland) culturally identify more closely with Swedes from Sweden, or with (the rest of) Finnish people? I’ve always been curious about this.
> do people in your group (Swedish speakers from Finland) culturally identify more closely with Swedes from Sweden, or with (the rest of) Finnish people?
They're definitely Finlanders. Rooting for Finland in Finland - Sweden sportsball games, general disdain for Swedes as "sissies", etc, etc.
Source: I'm an immigrant from Sweden to Finland; my son is a Finland-Swede.
Alternative source: I think I've read somewhere on the internet (or seen in some YouTube video?) an offhand quip along those same "Sissy Sweden-Swedes" lines by the internationally most well-known -- at least among the kind of people frequenting HN, I'd assume -- Finland-Swede, Linus Torvalds.
It's reasonable to think I'm immersed with Finnish, but I live in a part of Finland that is Swedish speaking, even by law (https://satwcomic.com/difficult-love). I have a Finnish speaking manager since 6 years back. We've never spoken anything else than English.
