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Originally Posted by HansTWN
Interesting facts about the cases. Finish/Hungarian/Estonian are not usually on most people's radar screen, but known to be difficult. Strange though, since these are languages of Asian origin.
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I don't know if "Asian origin" is really applicable here - Finno-Ugric languages, as the other Uralic languages, are believed to originate from somewhere in the Ural mountains region - which is the dividing line between Europe and Asia - and don't have much in common with either the main Asian language families or the Indo-European language family, although there may be some distant relationships with certain other (non-Uralic) Siberian language families.
It's interesting to me that it seems grammar isn't something that gets taught properly to native speakers in most countries. We got thorough grammar lessons from first year of school until the end, in Estonian as well as in all the foreign languages we had to learn (in my school I also had to learn Russian and English from first year onwards and then either German or French and either Swedish, Norwegian or Finnish later on in addition).
Knowing the basics of grammar in your own language - the rules, the structure of the language, the relationships between different parts of sentences, etc - is really helpful when learning other languages, in my experience.