Why Finnish is harder than Chinese. . .

So, when I started learning Finnish I had high hopes.  After all, isn't Chinese supposed to be one of the hardest languages to learn?  And hadn't I successfully told my brother not to drink juice in the living room because it was sticky and he UNDERSTOOD me?  After all, who needs more language competence than that.

So, I tackled Finnish. Bought a book, downloaded some pod casts, and immediately hit a brick wall.  Because whoever told me Chinese was harder than Finnish was obviously lying or had no idea what they were talking about.

Chinese is like legos.  You learn words, you stick them together in the right order and you form sentences. Easy.  All you have to do is memorize some vocabulary and a little bit of word order, and you're communicating.  No plurals, no verb conjugating, no messing around with gender.

Finnish is like. . . well, nothing really, that I can equate it to.  Words change all the time.  If my noun is plural and it's the object of the sentence, than its ending is different than if it's the subject of the sentence.  And if my noun is on top of something, than it needs another ending.  Or if it's headed somewhere.  And those suffixes can be added on together, and sometimes the stem of the noun they're added to is so different that it doesn't even look like the same noun. Consonants change, vowels are dropped or added.  So vesi is water, but veden is the possesive form and veteen is more or less equivalent to "into the water".  And the nouns (and adjectives) don't all thoughtfully follow the same patterns or have any distinguishing characteristics that I've discerned yet to know which pattern to use.

All of which leaves me with a lot of words floating around in my head, but not yet able to stick them together.  Even simple sentences like "my apartment has 3 bedrooms" defeat me.

So, maybe, eventually, it will all come together and I'll be speaking Finnish like a pro.  I know the pronunciation is easier, and I won't have to learn thousands of characters to be able to read a newspaper.  But for now, I'm wishing that Finnish were as easy to learn as Chinese.