Okay, it feels like for the past week my job and relatives conspired to make my life a nightmare. But last night I sort of finished the current job task and the majority of relatives left this morning. So maybe trying to recover some mental balance, including foreign languages.

Anyway, on the recurring topic of Scandinavian languages, here's an interesting video outlining what's going on with Swedish/Norwegian and Finnish:

One, I think, important takeaway is that the distance from those Germanic languages to Finnish is comparable the distance to Japanese or any such exotic language.

Also I wrote a post in Dutch on italki yesterday as a test and got very encouraging results... well, one result - one reply. It may sound presumptious on my part, but what that person put forward as grammatical corrections looked to me more like stylistic suggestions. Like, "you shouldn't start a sentence with 'but'". But I can say the same thing for English.