The full title of this topic was meant to be:
Native Finnish speakers’ perceptions about the syntactic complexity of their mother tongue
As a native Spanish speaker, the first impression I got when I started reading about Finnish grammar was: ‘I’m never gonna learn this’ (which wasn’t completely wrong) Everything seemed to be so puzzlingly irregular! The verbs are okay to me, since we have similar conjugation patterns in Spanish, but the Finnish case system appears to be just untamable. Ironically, this fact was one of the aspects that, because challenging, made me feel attracted to this beautiful language and go on studying it.
Now, I’d like to have an idea as to how native Finnish speakers perceive the complexity of their mother tongue. Do you perceive it at all? How common is it for you to mistake one case for another? How about lexical distinctions that depend on the length of the vowels and consonants, such as tuli/tuuli/tulli? Are they as clear to you when interacting orally as they are when reading? At what age does an average Finnish child master the said inflection systems?
Thank you all in advance for your replies!