Actually, by the way, Finland is bilingual. Our second language is Swedish, but not that we all speak it very well. I, for one, never had the interests to learn it very well. I can understand it, though. It's an official language here because there are so many native Swedish speakers living in Finland. After all, we were a part of Sweden once. And then a part of Russia. We got our intependence just before Russia became the Soviet Union, so we're not the oldest of intependent countries :laugh:
And I don't think that English is hard at all. I've been studying it since I was really small and when about half of the shows on TV are in English (subtitled, of course, but we only dub children's shows), it's not really that hard to learn the language. Besides, in our schools, we have to start studying our first language when we're on third grade (about 9 years old). Finnish really isn't useful in any other place of the world so our school system (and society overall) encourages us to study other languages. Practically every Finnish kid has to study three languages: Finnish, Swedish and English. So, I'm not really that smart... I've studied French and Japanese, though, and that's not something most people do. Well, French is pretty popular here.
But yeah, all of us study English, so don't overestimate me ^-^'' I've understood that studying other languages isn't a very big deal in USA, UK and Australia, for instance. So, I think one's ability to learn new languages depends greatly on their pattern of thoughts. We are told we have to learn, so we learn. You don't have to, so... you don't :D Finland is a small country, as I said before, so we really need to know other languages.
By the way, just out of curiousity, had you ever heard of Finland before you first spoke to me? :D