Nowadays, actually, the youth have difficulties in learning the language, at least the writing. In informal speech, it has for some time been a custom to drop some of the suffixes, or shorten them even further. Young people read less books than their older siblings and their parents, and it has even been suggested that the generation born in 1997 was the last to mostly do well in elementary school. That is, the youngsters who turn 19 this year. The decline is especially clear in compound words and punctuation. The younger people are, the more trouble they will have deciding whether they should write sanomalehti or sanoma lehti, and that is just sad. :/ (In case you were wondering, it's the first option, "sanomalehti", and it just means a newspaper, which, incidentally, is a compound word in English, too. It would look rather silly if someone wrote it "news paper", am I right?) Linguistic skills are important for communication, after all. I often will stress the importance of punctuation with this sentence from Alko's advertisement (Alko is the national alcoholic beverage retailing monopoly in Finland, and handles anything with over 4,5% of alcohol content basically):
"Älä välitä alkoholia nuorille!" ("Don't provide the youngsters with alcohol!")
"Älä välitä, alkoholia nuorille!" ("Nevermind, give alcohol to the youngsters!")
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Nowadays, actually, the youth have difficulties in learning the language, at least the writing. In informal speech, it has for some time been a custom to drop some of the suffixes, or shorten them even further. Young people read less books than their older siblings and their parents, and it has even been suggested that the generation born in 1997 was the last to mostly do well in elementary school. That is, the youngsters who turn 19 this year. The decline is especially clear in compound words and punctuation. The younger people are, the more trouble they will have deciding whether they should write sanomalehti or sanoma lehti, and that is just sad. :/ (In case you were wondering, it's the first option, "sanomalehti", and it just means a newspaper, which, incidentally, is a compound word in English, too. It would look rather silly if someone wrote it "news paper", am I right?) Linguistic skills are important for communication, after all. I often will stress the importance of punctuation with this sentence from Alko's advertisement (Alko is the national alcoholic beverage retailing monopoly in Finland, and handles anything with over 4,5% of alcohol content basically):
"Älä välitä alkoholia nuorille!" ("Don't provide the youngsters with alcohol!")
"Älä välitä, alkoholia nuorille!" ("Nevermind, give alcohol to the youngsters!")