Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm currently wondering if learning a "toy" language would help me learn a real language, in my case Finnish.
I'm pretty sure the best way is just to jump straight into Finnish, no point of getting confused by other languages or even toy languages. If you don't speak any other language than English (your website says you're Scottish) there's some positives in that also as you will have a strong place in your brain for Finnish as that "other language" and you won't freeze so easily when you must speak it. What I'm trying to s…
(Well the grammar is my biggest problem too, but everybody struggles with that when learning Finnish. It is very regular, and drilling in a classroom is easy "minä olen", "sinä olet", "han on" is very easy. But doing that in real-time when trying to form a sentence is way harder.)
I can manage the rolling Rs, and I can almost say Töölö properly, but I need to concentrate and remember! Until recently I'd been coasting because I was working in English-speaking offices. I suspect now I'm looking for another devops/sysadmin/developer job I should not limit myself to English-only offices, but I'm not sure how realistic that is. It doesn't help when I go to shops and people greet me in English!
I appreciate your kind offer, thank-you. For the moment I'll pass. I need to talk more to my wife and neighbours! (We've been told that I MUST not speak Finnish near our child, and keep the separation near total until he's older. Right now I speak English to our three-year old, and my wife speaks Finnish. He'll understand and reply in the appropriate language to each parent. That's pretty awesome and I'm lucky that I can understand at least 85% of what he says. Though sometimes I have to ask him to translate when he uses words I don't know talking to his mother!)