Apparently ä in swedish and ä in finnish are different but even with that the wikipedia article for swedish gives similar examples so now i feel a bit confused. For me they really do sound different. Also about writing how you speak, my native language, hungarian, also does that but with quite a few caveats. It uses multiple letters as one(diagraphs), groups together letters that sound different but dont change meaning when you say them differently(allophones) and also we write things how they work etymologically a lot of times. For me swedish ä sounds like a bit less “stressed” or “fat” e from hungarian.


Yeah i get it. When i read finnish i understand more from swedish, english and german than i do from hungarian. And its the exact same with translating for me. I once read a some random text as an example of how far apart they are and only a few words and letters matched up in patterns that made sense as a hungarian speaker. The grammar is supposed to be similar, i know a finn who learnt hungarian and he said he learnt the grammar much faster than the non finnish speakers. As for visiting finland i always wanted to but somehow even tho i live so close the only time ive been there is when i flew from budapest to iceland through helsinki. I did hear people speak it and you can notice the similarities that way.