> Isn't Finnish the language with 50 noun declensions or something mad like that?
I think you mean cases? These are mostly simple suffixes you attach on the end of the noun/adjective: for example talo (house), talossa (in the house, i.e. house-in). There's some rules around vowel harmony (same as with other Uralic languages like Hungarian, as well as Turkish) and consonant mutation (so a t becomes a d in a closed syllable) but these follow regular rules with a few exceptions for some foreign loanwords.
Vocabulary is quite small with lots of compound words - however other than some aforementioned loanwords (mostly from Swedish and more recently English) the core vocabulary is pretty alien to an Indo-European speaker. Spelling is completely phonetic (everything written as it's spelt) although as with most languages there are strong regional dialects.
Finnish has a lot of up-front rules to learn, but for the most part it's pretty regular with few exceptions (there's also the lack of grammatical gender, another feature of Uralic languages). Russian on the other hand is exceptions all the way down.
Seconding this. Endings are very regular, much more so than even (say) in Estonian. The base vocabulary is small (compared to English) and is acquired by sheer repetition (both active and passive). You need to retune your ear from English though, because both vowels and consonants differentiate between single and doubled (think: I scream, ice cream, ice scream).
I think you mean cases? These are mostly simple suffixes you attach on the end of the noun/adjective: for example talo (house), talossa (in the house, i.e. house-in). There's some rules around vowel harmony (same as with other Uralic languages like Hungarian, as well as Turkish) and consonant mutation (so a t becomes a d in a closed syllable) but these follow regular rules with a few exceptions for some foreign loanwords.
Vocabulary is quite small with lots of compound words - however other than some aforementioned loanwords (mostly from Swedish and more recently English) the core vocabulary is pretty alien to an Indo-European speaker. Spelling is completely phonetic (everything written as it's spelt) although as with most languages there are strong regional dialects.
Finnish has a lot of up-front rules to learn, but for the most part it's pretty regular with few exceptions (there's also the lack of grammatical gender, another feature of Uralic languages). Russian on the other hand is exceptions all the way down.