Learning Finnish

Who is learning or wants to learn Finnish?

Be warned, this language is very difficult!

I - still - am . Tried it once myself, then turned to help from a Finnish friend. So far the only thing I'm flawless at is cursing and ordering beers...

I started learning on my own before coming to Finland, then after moving here I got a bit unmotivated by the fact that the courses in our school were not that good and that everyone speaks English everywhere anyway. In the beginning of this year I joined a course again, it's still a bit too easy for my level, but better than nothing. And I'm trying to read easier books and subtitles on Netflix and such.

Now I've gotten to a point that sometimes I understand, depends on the subject mostly (if it's music there's a pretty big chance to understand but topics like politics I might not even understand the main ideas). Written Finnish is MUCH easier, and I kinda have problems speaking Finnish to people that I know, so unless they are strangers I really try to avoid that.

But it's an awesome language, so I hope that at some point soonish I'll have enough confidence/knowledge to start actually using it.

I only know basics. I am pretty much teaching myself. There is a class at a Lutheran church in my state, but that would be a total of 4 hour drive to and from. That is not worth my time or gas. They really need a Finnish class in my town.

Like you said though Arina, mostly everyone in Finland speaks English. lol Netflix uses Finnish language/subtitles?

Well the difficulty in our language is that there are 2 sides to it, there is the proper way to speak finnish and then there is the "slang" way to speak finnish and unfortunately majority speak the slang version. Now if you have studied finnish in school what they teach you is the proper way so in the end you learn the proper way but doesn't have a clue what people in the streets are actually even saying...words here and there.

That happened to my wife and it frustrated her a lot.

^Yeah, that too. You spend ages learning to conjugate the verbs, and when you think you finally understood and got used to everything, "Minä tulen" turns to "Mä tuun", and everything changes.
Though my biggest problem has been the fact that the words are not at all similar to words in other languages, so then you have to learn every single word and that's why it gets hard to understand. For a long time I was reading cooking instructions and similar stuff in Swedish just because it was so much easier. And I've never studied Swedish.

Anteroom Of Death wrote:Like you said though Arina, mostly everyone in Finland speaks English. lol Netflix uses Finnish language/subtitles?

Well Finnish or Swedish subtitles for English movies.

Hehe, good point, this thread.

I agree with Sorcha: I *still* am. Anything you do just by yourself requires a lot of discipline, and being Finnish such a hard language, I'd say even more. For a while, I had a teacher, and actually the little I can say is mostly what he taught me (beyond 'perkele', 'moi' and 'kiitos' that I already knew). Then, in my first trip to Finland I bought one of those fantastic methods with book+cd... and I'm still stuck on lesson 3, having learnt nothing really from the book... but what my friend had previously told me, LOL.

In my awesome attempts to build a whole sentence, simple but gramatically correct, I chose the oddest combinations of words (considering the little vocabulary I have), and more exceptions and irregular words than I would have liked. :_)

But I don't despair... someday I'll do it!!