As everyone said, Finnish is of course very different from English. However, I would just like to point out that Torvalds is a Swedish-speaking Finn; Swedish and English are relatively similar. They both belong to the Germanic language family, and they share a lot of cognates: hus/house, katt/cat, man/man, öppna/open, dörr/door, skit/shit, is/ice, tuff/tough, etc. Some other words' similarity with English isn't striking at first but it makes sense once you get a grasp of how the language sounds, e.g. stjäla/steal, lätt/light, etc.
As an expatriate in Sweden, I think Swedish isn't that daunting to pick up at first, although the pronunciation is kinda tough.
Mastering a language, however similar it is to your native language, still requires a lot of work.