In case you are wondering if I am still trying to finally grasp the Finnish language: Yes I am. The 'Learning to Speak Finnish' blog may not be updated daily, but I do promise one or two updates a week to show you I'm still at it, as I am determined to this time crack at least a little bit of it. Throughout the years, I have given my studies of Finnish already many different tries. I started this right after I first met my wife, when I bought my first Finnish language course, only to be completely baffled by the complete incomprehensability of it. Nothing I saw on the pages of that book made any sense at all(well, except for of course the English translations), as the Finnish language seemed more like an exercise in squeezing as many letters as possible into a single word than something that people can actually speak.
Things didn't get a lot better when I made my first trip to Finland and I actually heard the people speak. Though it sounds very nice, almost like a cross of Italian and Japanese, it made as much sense as when people would just hum to me or make something up as they went along. Of course, most languages are like that to people who don't speak them, but in a lot of languages there are at least some words you could recognize. In Finnish, this was limited to the word 'sauna' (luckily they use that word quite a bit, since the Finnish people spend a lot of time in saunas).
Still, I was determined to study the language, and bought a new course, this time a more simple one with tapes. Slowly but surely a few words stuck in my brain, and the next time I went to Finland I was actually able to say 'thank you' (kiitos) in shops. I did also try some other words, but this would mostly mean that the Finnish people on the receiving end of my language experiments would start to speak Finnish back to me, followed by a long uncomfortable silence and a quick and silent 'kiitos' from me, after which I would try to disappear as quickly as possible.
Back in Holland, I ran across an ad from Linguaphone, which is this renowned company promising you to learn a new language in three months, which I ordered and quickly received. I dove right into it, progressing to the third lesson before I gave up, wondering if I would ever be able to ever learn to speak or at least understand Finnish. And then a long, returning cycle started, with me going to Finland, cursing myself for not understanding more of the language, starting to study when I arrived back at home, only to stop again after a week or so because it's so damn hard. So I'm hoping that actually blogging about it will give me that extra push I need to not quit all the time. I can probably understand about 100 words of Finnish at the moment, not counting words for numbers (I can count to about 1000), and I'm hoping to rapidly increase that total. Hopefully before the next time I go to Finland sometime in the beginning of next year!
Moi, I have been tring to learn Finnish for a while now....off and on for about a year...so maybe you could help me out a bit :)
Posted by: Breanna | December 18, 2007 at 05:09 AM