Hei!

For the past nine years, my Finnish family in law has heard me tell them countless times that the next time I would visit Finland, I would finally be able to speak Finnish. As you can probably already guess from the title of this blog, this hasn't happened yet. To be completely honest, the number of 'teach yourself Finnish books' in my closet has increased more than my knowledge of the language itself. I know a few words of Finnish, and with a bit of trying I can string a line or two together, but if a Finnish person would answer those lines, I would be completely lost before he or she has finished the sentence. It's not that I don't want to learn the language, or that I don't have any feeling for languages. In fact, back in school I used to get my highest grades for the language classes (admittedly not that difficult when compared to my other grades), so you could say I have at least a bit of a knack for speaking in a different language than my own.

The thing is, though, that Finnish is damn hard. Finnish people reading this are probably laughing now, proud that they can learn a different language with seemingly no troubles whatsoever, while I am still struggling to even ask a Finnish person what time it is, but I'll show them yet. As a part of the ten challenges I have put upon myself, I will finally dedicate myself to studying Finnish and being able to speak it within a year from now. I'm not saying I am going to be fluent, but at the very least I want to be able to know what my wife is talking about when she and her family or friends are looking at me and laughing. And I want to be able to really understand the popular Finnish comic strip Vivi and Wagner. In fact, I want to dramatically increase my knowledge of the language even before my next trip to Finland, which will probably be somewhere in the beginning of next year, so I've got my work cut out for me. At the very least, I will be able to call my posts something a bit less lame than just the Finnish equivalent of the word "Hi".

Comments

[vaimo]

Hyvä! :)