Forgot to mention: part of the funnyness to me is that the Finnish word for family, "perhe", is only very slightly different: replace the sibilant with an exhalation, and that's it. Also works for a kid-friendly expletive, you see.
Finnish being easier than English? "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
Only because I grew up with it, of course. It has its beautiful features like all languages have.. Tolkien for example liked the
phonotactics, and used those to create Quenya.
I myself don't often speak English aloud at all. I read a lot, and use it in very narrow technical contexts, but outside of entertainment (mostly Youtube, old comedies et cetera), nothing "social". About the opposite to majority of English speakers, I guess. Some of the issues and errors I make are just
to native speakers. Although I almost never confuse then/than or they/their/they're (except as typos), so it is not that I make fewer errors, mine are just
different. For example, at one point I realized my pronounciation had degraded so much (due to lack of use) that people had trouble telling whether I said "can" or "can't". I switched to letting my Finnish Rally English Accent come clear through, and that made my speech much easier to understand, it seems.
(At school, we are taught that That Accent Is The Worst Sin, and should emulate British/American/etc. pronunciation, because Rally English, although clear and understandable, being instantly recognizable, immediately marks us as Finnish and that is Shameful. Don't get self-hating xenophiles teach you foreign languages; the results are just too odd. Many, many Finns, especially the older folk, won't talk to you in English because they fear you laugh at their accent. Get them drunk, and suddenly they talk like five languages. Usually all mixed together, though. The tales I could tell, for example of that one discussion where the Finn used 'swamps' instead of 'mushrooms', because of Swedish influence. Was hilarious, what with the mental imagery of someone eating peat and whatnot.)
Wrt. the language issues all over this thread, my point here is that it is not just language, nor just culture. Some of us just use non-native languages in weird ways that make for odd (and hopefully entertaining) errors and mistakes. Speaking a language
well does not mean you know all the idioms used, and that explains many of the funny company names. It is not just a matter of picking up a thesaurus or automatic translator, although the company and product names generated that way are definitely in their own hilarious class. Sometimes it is just, whatstheword, context or social circles or such.
I happened to stumble on certain videos and stuff that used the pressurized air analogs for certain electrical circuits recently. You can talk about whether the analog is apt or not, but fact is, very few kids nowadays know anything about pressurized air (except that you either have to pump it, or you get it from a hose at the gas station). Which makes that approach, well, hilarious: it's like trying to teach city kids computer repair by using livestock rearing similes and analogs.
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