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 say is that I at least find myself very often "frozen" when having a conversation in a language in which my level is similar to another language. Polish and Spanish are both languages that I'm able to survive with but if I'm looking for the word e.g. for "Saturday" in Polish I might suddenly find myself stuck in the Spanish word for it. Add Swedish to the confusion and I might as well give up and hope to be understood in English, which is also not my first language, but at least I have a much more strong grasp of it than other languages (except Finnish) so that it isn't subject to the confusion most of the time. YMMV but I hope you get the point and maybe even find some encouragement in it to just start learning Finnish straight away.
Also, since you are Scottish you might already be able to roll your R's and pronounce the letters "ä" and "ö" the "Finnish way" since at least some Scottish accents have those "sounds", which is not the case for e.g. Australian, North American or Southern English accents.
Let me know if you want a Finn to talk to and I'll shoot you an email. ;)
Yeah my biggest problem is making the effort and having the practice of learning vocabulary.
(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!)
