Pasi Sahlberg: lessons from Finnish education

[Igel]

4. A standard assumption in linguistics is

that every language is about equally hard to learn if you're raised around it.

Even languages with what appear to us to have absurd phonologies or declension systems. Or tones.

(Another one is that race/ethnicity of the parents doesn't matter--this was a big deal in the 1910s and 1920s, when the claim was made that anybody of any race raised in an environment with Mandarin, Zulu, English, etc., spoken would be equally fluent and adept, on average, as anybody of any other race. Human is human is human.)

I have trouble with tonal languages, but I don't speak one natively. Don't even talkabout agglutinative languages. As for the Finnish sound changes (or are those Estonian? or both? Dang, I'm getting old ...) I find it amusing to compare them with Welsh lenition and fortition.