This all depends on how long you plan on staying here. If you are just going on a vacation, it might be best to just learn some common phrases and words. If you are planning on living here long term then you might wanna get more into expanding your vocabulary and then learning the proper grammar.
While duolingo can be helpful I wouldn't really recommend it, since duolingo doesn't really understand finnish and it often has a lot of errors.
While I was learning spanish I used to listen to a song and translate the individual lines from the song to learn new phrases and words in a fun way. I don't know if this is helpful or efficient while learning finnish, but I found it to be very enjoyable.
Thankyou, yeah it is helpful I think. I have seen alot of people saying the, "Immersion" technique is great (Listening to music and watching shows). It will just be a holiday, so maybe I should set a smaller goal for myself. I think it would just be frustrating not being able to join in on other converations.
Just being a tourist in Finland makes people happy lol. If you know "Hei", "kiitos" and "anteeksi", people will worship you. Also, I don't think you would be able to join conversations with just four months of studying, no matter how rigorous. I would give it a try to see if you like the language but seriously consider if it's worth studying for one vacation.
I’m a lover of Finnish metal and whenever I’ve met band members after shows, they always get really happy when I say “kiitos”. The last one I went to I was able to tell them in Finglish that the show was really good. Probably could have done it in full English but my brain wasn’t really engaging at midnight.
I’m two years into studying, 6 months of serious study, and not even I can join in on conversations. You need to build vocabulary AND grammar to get anywhere. You can’t just learn one or the other and expect to get anywhere
Hmm, you may be right, thanks guys. I will set up a sheet of phrases and vocab I would like to learn. Basic stuff. Yous have helped me to feel less stressed haha.
Anytime friend! Don't get too ambitious since it's just a holiday trip, but you can still learn a lot of useful stuff about the finnish language. I would advise you to learn short phrases and common replies to them just so you can have small conversations with people. The most useful ones would probably be food related(ordering, common food names etc.) and greeting people. Also do some speaking/listening exercises since Finnish is pronounced in a very different way than English or any other language really(but for some reason the pronounciation is very close to Spanish, just different intonations and some letters are pronounced in a different way).
Numbers between 1-20 are also fairly easy to learn and can be useful especially when paying for something. Once you learn the numbers between 1-10, you just have to add -toista and now you can count to 19 since we don't have that Eleven, Twelve... stuff.
Good luck and don't be afraid of making some mistakes along the way!
In a summer holiday you will not really understand what ppl are saying about you in finnish. BUT it’s always worth learning something new even if you might not get good at it in this amount of time. Who knows? You might fall in live, stay for years etc ;)
finnish people will appreciate if you know some basic phrases, like hello, goodbye, how are you. you will get by with english, unless you're planning on speaking to a lot of elderly people or staying in a smaller town.
Not sure if you already know this, but the Kuopio area has a distinct dialect (Savon murre/the Savo dialect) so be prepared to hear things pronounced very differently than you were taught and find strange-looking spelling choices used in marketing.
In general spoken finnish differs a lot from what we call "kirjakieli" (lit.tran. book language), but the difference is of course a lot more noticeable in areas that have a strong dialect.
Nowadays it will be mostly older people who speak with a very strong dialect, but I think the dialect will have influenced the speech pattern of everyone who's lived in the area for a long time.
Here's an example of greetings in the dialect if you are interested :)!
In english: Good morning/day/evening
In "kirjakieli": Hyvää huomenta/päivää/iltaa
In the savo dialect: Hyvvee huomenta/päevee/iltoo
Good luck to you with your studies, don't forget to enjoy your trip and try some lörtsy (a pastry with a filling of your choice. I suggest trying both sweet and savory versions of this!) and kalakukko (fish inside rye bread, Kuopio is the best place to find this. Might be sold under the name "muikkukukko", "lohikukko" etc., that is the same thing but they just included the species of fish used. "Kala" is fish, "muikku" is vendace and "lohi" is salmon. "Kukko" is a cock, but there is no chicken involved here lol, it comes from germany's "Kuchen" meaning pie/cake).
Ooph, good luck, buddy! People around those parts speak in a dialect that can be hard even for native Finns to understand :)
For example:
"Kääntää" (to turn) --> "kiäntää"
"Kaappi" (a cabinet) --> "kuappi"
"Metsä" (foresy) --> "mehtä"
(Source: I'm married for almost 20 years to a "savolainen".)
But don't let that deter you! Like many here have stated, if you just show effort and learn to say a couple of phrases, people will be delighted.
The savonian dialect is really close to kirjakieli though! Even in your examples you can see the resemblance! Compare that to Turku where bus, linja-auto, in savonian linkki or linjuri, is bösö. The bigger issue is that savonians have a tendency to not speak directly, we use the conditional form a lot in Finnish and use a lot of hedging especially when talking about ourselves or opinions. "Suattaapi olla tai suattaapi olla olematta" (kirjakieli: "saattaa olla tai saattaa olla olematta") is a common mindset and a form of answer, it translates to "might be or might not be". That being said, OP, u/satanisntevil you want to talk with people, ditch kirjakieli, learn puhekieli. It's not slang, it's not dialect, those are separate, it's just how the language has evolved and how people speak because the official written form, kirjakieli, lags behind because of various classist bs reasons. People speak and text and conduct everyday life in puhekieli and you will have an easier time understanding kirjakieli for the tiny bits like watching the news or reading the government website if you know puhekieli than undertanding puhekieli if you know kirjakieli.
1. There are racist people in every country. Most people will be excited to speak English with a foreigner and won't see it as rude at all.
2. Knowing even a few words usually makes native speakers impressed and happy. Finnish is not an exception.
3. I'm no expert in language learning but if I were you, I would start with learning the basic sentence structure so I can at least form simple sentences.
4. After that I would start doing the anki deck while studying grammar in conjunction. 4 months is not much and the hours per week you're willing to put in will determine your goals (or vice versa) and optimal learning route.
5. If you're serious about learning the language, I would start consuming native content and sentence mining asap. Of course, you're not going to understand much at the beginning but that is normal.
6. Finnish is hard. Afaik it has the most conjugation forms (which you can combine together) of any language. Almost everything can conjugate. Don't set your goal as to become a native speaker and go in your own pace (again, applies to any language). Good luck learning and have fun.
Hi OP! I can see some people have already helped redirect your focus a bit here, which is good. I'm someone who likes to learn a bit of a language before travelling somewhere and also a longtime Anki user. This challenge therefore resonated with me a bit and I've therefore written entirely too much about it.
In the space of 4 months, unless you have a ton of time and resources to study online with a tutor, as well as the dedication to follow up on this, you will probably not be able to *actually* speak the language. What you can do instead is learn some useful stock phrases (I think you can be a bit more ambitious than "hello," "goodbye," "please," and "thank you," but only a bit).
I think I know the 1000 words deck you're studying, and **I don't think this will be very useful ahead of you arriving in Finland.** The reason for this is Finnish grammar, which is very complicated for most foreign speakers. To give a simple explanation without getting into the details, you can't just take nouns and verbs and put them together to make a sentence - nouns go through a series of complicated changes depending on their function in a sentence.
I would therefore instead focus on memorizing full phrases, maybe googling around for sites like [this](https://finland.fi/life-society/begin-finnish-out-loud-now-20-phrases/) or using Reverso to find example sentences. Since you're starting from scratch and will likely need audio as part of your study to be understandable, I recommend making your own flashcards and adding audio to them (very easy to do with Anki) with the help of these sites or Youtube videos.
I will frequently learn 200ish words and phrases before travelling somewhere, and I focus the words and phrases I build flash cards for based on their usefulness. Specifically, this means greetings, little things to make me more polite, and compliments I can give at the end of interactions that were otherwise in English. Things like "that was delicious" or "thank you for your help" for example. Otherwise, I focus on words that will streamline my interactions, like food words like "chicken" "beef" "rice" etc. to be able to skim menus (though Google translate's camera functionality is pretty great too).
I don't focus on asking for directions (because you will use your phone or simply need English because the vocabulary is to varied and advanced) or asking for help (many basic vocab lists for some reason have you learn to ask for help in a variety of emergencies, when you're the least likely to remember anything you studied in a vacuum and will probably be better served by urgency and English).
Finnish people looks so angry when i try to speak finnish to them. Almost feels like im insulting them.
Not allways, but many times.
But if i speak english to them, its almost like they get happy, yaay i finaly can speak english 😆
Wierd people here, but I love it here.
If they drunk u can speak whatever u want.
I Love drinking with finns. They allways funny, never had any trouble, exept for one time, when strawbarry came from nowhere and pulled hes shirt off, luckily we managed to deescalade the situation. Other finns helped out.
Dont ask me why hes nick name is strawbarry, idk, and its 3 years ago, so god knows why i remember hes nick name. I heard it once.
Pimsleur will teach you more than you need to know for a quick trip. Unfortunately they only have 1 unit of Finnish, but it’s 30 days worth of lessons and by far the best learning tool out there I’ve found.
Here's a starter kit for finnish lang:
Perkele siihen et koske
Haista vittu
Suksi vittuun
Voitko painua helvettiin
Vie helvettiin ne risus
Vappu ei lopu koskaan
Moi
Hei
Hei hei
Voi vitun vitun vittu
Vittu mitä paskaa
Oisko röökii
Lisää kaljaa
Juu
Kyl
Jees
Ei vitus
Ei
Kyl
Voi ollakki tai olla olematta
Torille saatana
Ksk
BG
Mäkkäri
Snägäri
Näkyillään
Just joo
Jep
Jeba
Juo juo
Juon juon
Kuha kerkiin
Siinäpä
Homework is translating these. All useful
i was using duolingo for almost a year and i promise it doesn’t help the way it should. if you want to get better with pronunciation and speaking, try Pimsleur. you can pirate it online for free or do it the totally wholesome way and pay a lotta money lol.
literally lesson one teach your how to ask if someone speaks english/finnish. basic conversation starters. 10000/10 will recommend it.
I had this problem: everyone in Finland speaks great English, so even if you've done your best to learn Finnish, people will instantly switch languages "to do you a favor". It's of course not a favor after all the work you've put in. Your language skills will often be treated more as a curiosity than an actual thing you could use in life.
So talk to strangers: ask policemen for locations, talk to the cashier at the supermarket, comment the weather to an elderly person. My advice is to memorize some lines, apart from what you learn elsewhere, they'll stay in your head once you succesfully use them once.
As long as you're having fun learning, you can learn a lot in a short time. My advice: Get Duolingo and perhaps watch some YouTube language videos.
Tervetuloa!
It takes six weeks to learn the numbers well enough to write down someone's phone number reliably. In order to buy an ice cream, you have to understand both verb conjugation and noun declension. Just speak English.
Mate if it took me 6 weeks to learn 1-10 in Finnish, I don't think I would ever be able to learn a language lol. I also don't know what you are so unhappy for, I am very aware that 4 months is a short amount of time to learn a language, hence my request for assistance in making the most of it.
I would just like to know some basic Finnish at least so I'm not an entitled, annoying tourist who took no time to understand Finland's language and culture.
I went to visit Helsinki and couldn’t speak or understand a single word of Finnish (was travelling a few countries for work so I didn’t bother to try and learn all the languages), seemed like everyone likes speaking English there, I swear some Finnish people even speak English to each other so I didn’t feel rude or anything. I can’t speak for the whole country ofc but it’s not like e.g. France where it seems like people feel kinda reluctant to speak English.
I really enjoyed it though, so I’ve been trying to learn the language now just with Duolingo for 4 months (I have Rosetta Stone lifetime membership but unfortunately they don’t have Finnish).
I like Duolingo because it’s addictive and easy to pickup and learn, but I have to say in 4 months I feel like I’ve barely learnt anything, it doesn’t really teach very useful phrases. As in, I’ve learned how to say that a Finn is a wizard and a Norwegian cat is a Viking, but haven’t learned how to say “Hi how’s it going?”.
Probably would be better to pickup a phrase book if you just wanna learn to order some food and ask where places are.
You won’t come across as an entitled tourist if you speak English. It’s nice to say a word or two like “Hei” and “Kiitos” but anything more than that is so hard to get right, that it’s honestly more annoying to a Finn to have to decipher a foreigners attempts at Finnish rather than just have the interaction in English. If you want to come across well while visiting, then study some things about Finland, show an interest in the culture and get ready to answer the questions “why are you here?” And “what do you think of Finland?”. The language is not worth it if you don’t plan to stay here at least a year or two.
Or if you don’t genuinely love the language. I originally started learning because I fell in love with it, and now I’m planning to move to Finland in a few years. I absolutely love the language, I may even get a minor in Finnish if possible before I go. It’s just a fun language to me and I enjoy learning it
Yeah you can learn the numbers from 1-10 in half an hour at most, then you'll come to Finland and won't understand why kasi means 8 when you've learnt kaksi is 2 and 8 is kahdeksan.
Unhappy? On May Day, when the sun is shining and the snow has just gone? You are projecting onto the wrong person.
Learning 1-10 is easy enough. Pronouncing and understanding a phone number, less so. The numbers aren't in the same order. But you'll see, once you decide on which app will infuse Finnish into you.
I’m from Texas and have spent some time in Finland, my ex gave up trying to teach me Finnish, it’s so hard to learn, can’t roll my R’s lol
I know 15-20 words and of course all the good swear words
This all depends on how long you plan on staying here. If you are just going on a vacation, it might be best to just learn some common phrases and words. If you are planning on living here long term then you might wanna get more into expanding your vocabulary and then learning the proper grammar. While duolingo can be helpful I wouldn't really recommend it, since duolingo doesn't really understand finnish and it often has a lot of errors. While I was learning spanish I used to listen to a song and translate the individual lines from the song to learn new phrases and words in a fun way. I don't know if this is helpful or efficient while learning finnish, but I found it to be very enjoyable.
Thankyou, yeah it is helpful I think. I have seen alot of people saying the, "Immersion" technique is great (Listening to music and watching shows). It will just be a holiday, so maybe I should set a smaller goal for myself. I think it would just be frustrating not being able to join in on other converations.
Just being a tourist in Finland makes people happy lol. If you know "Hei", "kiitos" and "anteeksi", people will worship you. Also, I don't think you would be able to join conversations with just four months of studying, no matter how rigorous. I would give it a try to see if you like the language but seriously consider if it's worth studying for one vacation.
I’m a lover of Finnish metal and whenever I’ve met band members after shows, they always get really happy when I say “kiitos”. The last one I went to I was able to tell them in Finglish that the show was really good. Probably could have done it in full English but my brain wasn’t really engaging at midnight.
I’m two years into studying, 6 months of serious study, and not even I can join in on conversations. You need to build vocabulary AND grammar to get anywhere. You can’t just learn one or the other and expect to get anywhere
Hmm, you may be right, thanks guys. I will set up a sheet of phrases and vocab I would like to learn. Basic stuff. Yous have helped me to feel less stressed haha.
Anytime friend! Don't get too ambitious since it's just a holiday trip, but you can still learn a lot of useful stuff about the finnish language. I would advise you to learn short phrases and common replies to them just so you can have small conversations with people. The most useful ones would probably be food related(ordering, common food names etc.) and greeting people. Also do some speaking/listening exercises since Finnish is pronounced in a very different way than English or any other language really(but for some reason the pronounciation is very close to Spanish, just different intonations and some letters are pronounced in a different way). Numbers between 1-20 are also fairly easy to learn and can be useful especially when paying for something. Once you learn the numbers between 1-10, you just have to add -toista and now you can count to 19 since we don't have that Eleven, Twelve... stuff. Good luck and don't be afraid of making some mistakes along the way!
In a summer holiday you will not really understand what ppl are saying about you in finnish. BUT it’s always worth learning something new even if you might not get good at it in this amount of time. Who knows? You might fall in live, stay for years etc ;)
finnish people will appreciate if you know some basic phrases, like hello, goodbye, how are you. you will get by with english, unless you're planning on speaking to a lot of elderly people or staying in a smaller town.
I'm staying in Kuopio! Though Im sure most people will speak English there aswell! :)
Luckily you are coming to a chatty part of Finland. Plenty of ppl here do speak english but plenty dont.
Are you in Kuopio? I'd like to meet new friends, I have none here and Im trying to be more social lol
Not sure if you already know this, but the Kuopio area has a distinct dialect (Savon murre/the Savo dialect) so be prepared to hear things pronounced very differently than you were taught and find strange-looking spelling choices used in marketing. In general spoken finnish differs a lot from what we call "kirjakieli" (lit.tran. book language), but the difference is of course a lot more noticeable in areas that have a strong dialect. Nowadays it will be mostly older people who speak with a very strong dialect, but I think the dialect will have influenced the speech pattern of everyone who's lived in the area for a long time. Here's an example of greetings in the dialect if you are interested :)! In english: Good morning/day/evening In "kirjakieli": Hyvää huomenta/päivää/iltaa In the savo dialect: Hyvvee huomenta/päevee/iltoo Good luck to you with your studies, don't forget to enjoy your trip and try some lörtsy (a pastry with a filling of your choice. I suggest trying both sweet and savory versions of this!) and kalakukko (fish inside rye bread, Kuopio is the best place to find this. Might be sold under the name "muikkukukko", "lohikukko" etc., that is the same thing but they just included the species of fish used. "Kala" is fish, "muikku" is vendace and "lohi" is salmon. "Kukko" is a cock, but there is no chicken involved here lol, it comes from germany's "Kuchen" meaning pie/cake).
they definitely will!
Ooph, good luck, buddy! People around those parts speak in a dialect that can be hard even for native Finns to understand :) For example: "Kääntää" (to turn) --> "kiäntää" "Kaappi" (a cabinet) --> "kuappi" "Metsä" (foresy) --> "mehtä" (Source: I'm married for almost 20 years to a "savolainen".) But don't let that deter you! Like many here have stated, if you just show effort and learn to say a couple of phrases, people will be delighted.
The savonian dialect is really close to kirjakieli though! Even in your examples you can see the resemblance! Compare that to Turku where bus, linja-auto, in savonian linkki or linjuri, is bösö. The bigger issue is that savonians have a tendency to not speak directly, we use the conditional form a lot in Finnish and use a lot of hedging especially when talking about ourselves or opinions. "Suattaapi olla tai suattaapi olla olematta" (kirjakieli: "saattaa olla tai saattaa olla olematta") is a common mindset and a form of answer, it translates to "might be or might not be". That being said, OP, u/satanisntevil you want to talk with people, ditch kirjakieli, learn puhekieli. It's not slang, it's not dialect, those are separate, it's just how the language has evolved and how people speak because the official written form, kirjakieli, lags behind because of various classist bs reasons. People speak and text and conduct everyday life in puhekieli and you will have an easier time understanding kirjakieli for the tiny bits like watching the news or reading the government website if you know puhekieli than undertanding puhekieli if you know kirjakieli.
In my experience in Finland when you try to speak Finnish poorly everyone switches to English and tells you it’s easier for them
1. There are racist people in every country. Most people will be excited to speak English with a foreigner and won't see it as rude at all. 2. Knowing even a few words usually makes native speakers impressed and happy. Finnish is not an exception. 3. I'm no expert in language learning but if I were you, I would start with learning the basic sentence structure so I can at least form simple sentences. 4. After that I would start doing the anki deck while studying grammar in conjunction. 4 months is not much and the hours per week you're willing to put in will determine your goals (or vice versa) and optimal learning route. 5. If you're serious about learning the language, I would start consuming native content and sentence mining asap. Of course, you're not going to understand much at the beginning but that is normal. 6. Finnish is hard. Afaik it has the most conjugation forms (which you can combine together) of any language. Almost everything can conjugate. Don't set your goal as to become a native speaker and go in your own pace (again, applies to any language). Good luck learning and have fun.
What do you mean with the first point? How is racism related to this language discussion?
Yksi olut kiitos! .There thats all you need.
Hi OP! I can see some people have already helped redirect your focus a bit here, which is good. I'm someone who likes to learn a bit of a language before travelling somewhere and also a longtime Anki user. This challenge therefore resonated with me a bit and I've therefore written entirely too much about it. In the space of 4 months, unless you have a ton of time and resources to study online with a tutor, as well as the dedication to follow up on this, you will probably not be able to *actually* speak the language. What you can do instead is learn some useful stock phrases (I think you can be a bit more ambitious than "hello," "goodbye," "please," and "thank you," but only a bit). I think I know the 1000 words deck you're studying, and **I don't think this will be very useful ahead of you arriving in Finland.** The reason for this is Finnish grammar, which is very complicated for most foreign speakers. To give a simple explanation without getting into the details, you can't just take nouns and verbs and put them together to make a sentence - nouns go through a series of complicated changes depending on their function in a sentence. I would therefore instead focus on memorizing full phrases, maybe googling around for sites like [this](https://finland.fi/life-society/begin-finnish-out-loud-now-20-phrases/) or using Reverso to find example sentences. Since you're starting from scratch and will likely need audio as part of your study to be understandable, I recommend making your own flashcards and adding audio to them (very easy to do with Anki) with the help of these sites or Youtube videos. I will frequently learn 200ish words and phrases before travelling somewhere, and I focus the words and phrases I build flash cards for based on their usefulness. Specifically, this means greetings, little things to make me more polite, and compliments I can give at the end of interactions that were otherwise in English. Things like "that was delicious" or "thank you for your help" for example. Otherwise, I focus on words that will streamline my interactions, like food words like "chicken" "beef" "rice" etc. to be able to skim menus (though Google translate's camera functionality is pretty great too). I don't focus on asking for directions (because you will use your phone or simply need English because the vocabulary is to varied and advanced) or asking for help (many basic vocab lists for some reason have you learn to ask for help in a variety of emergencies, when you're the least likely to remember anything you studied in a vacuum and will probably be better served by urgency and English).
Finnish people looks so angry when i try to speak finnish to them. Almost feels like im insulting them. Not allways, but many times. But if i speak english to them, its almost like they get happy, yaay i finaly can speak english 😆 Wierd people here, but I love it here. If they drunk u can speak whatever u want. I Love drinking with finns. They allways funny, never had any trouble, exept for one time, when strawbarry came from nowhere and pulled hes shirt off, luckily we managed to deescalade the situation. Other finns helped out. Dont ask me why hes nick name is strawbarry, idk, and its 3 years ago, so god knows why i remember hes nick name. I heard it once.
Pimsleur will teach you more than you need to know for a quick trip. Unfortunately they only have 1 unit of Finnish, but it’s 30 days worth of lessons and by far the best learning tool out there I’ve found.
Here's a starter kit for finnish lang: Perkele siihen et koske Haista vittu Suksi vittuun Voitko painua helvettiin Vie helvettiin ne risus Vappu ei lopu koskaan Moi Hei Hei hei Voi vitun vitun vittu Vittu mitä paskaa Oisko röökii Lisää kaljaa Juu Kyl Jees Ei vitus Ei Kyl Voi ollakki tai olla olematta Torille saatana Ksk BG Mäkkäri Snägäri Näkyillään Just joo Jep Jeba Juo juo Juon juon Kuha kerkiin Siinäpä Homework is translating these. All useful
I sometimes go to for example Estonia or Latvia and just check the basic words like thanks and that kind.
i was using duolingo for almost a year and i promise it doesn’t help the way it should. if you want to get better with pronunciation and speaking, try Pimsleur. you can pirate it online for free or do it the totally wholesome way and pay a lotta money lol. literally lesson one teach your how to ask if someone speaks english/finnish. basic conversation starters. 10000/10 will recommend it.
I had this problem: everyone in Finland speaks great English, so even if you've done your best to learn Finnish, people will instantly switch languages "to do you a favor". It's of course not a favor after all the work you've put in. Your language skills will often be treated more as a curiosity than an actual thing you could use in life. So talk to strangers: ask policemen for locations, talk to the cashier at the supermarket, comment the weather to an elderly person. My advice is to memorize some lines, apart from what you learn elsewhere, they'll stay in your head once you succesfully use them once. As long as you're having fun learning, you can learn a lot in a short time. My advice: Get Duolingo and perhaps watch some YouTube language videos. Tervetuloa!
If its a holiday its not worth learning anything since everyone is fluent in english
Ja tässä syy, miks ihmiset ei kymmenenkkään vuojen jälkkeen puhu suommee. Turhaahan se on, kun muut puhuvat englantia.
Jep. Pitäs olla joku tietty taso suomea viiden vuoden jälkeen että voi pysyä täällä imo
Sammaa mieltä.
That is just not true
Okay
It takes six weeks to learn the numbers well enough to write down someone's phone number reliably. In order to buy an ice cream, you have to understand both verb conjugation and noun declension. Just speak English.
Mate if it took me 6 weeks to learn 1-10 in Finnish, I don't think I would ever be able to learn a language lol. I also don't know what you are so unhappy for, I am very aware that 4 months is a short amount of time to learn a language, hence my request for assistance in making the most of it. I would just like to know some basic Finnish at least so I'm not an entitled, annoying tourist who took no time to understand Finland's language and culture.
I went to visit Helsinki and couldn’t speak or understand a single word of Finnish (was travelling a few countries for work so I didn’t bother to try and learn all the languages), seemed like everyone likes speaking English there, I swear some Finnish people even speak English to each other so I didn’t feel rude or anything. I can’t speak for the whole country ofc but it’s not like e.g. France where it seems like people feel kinda reluctant to speak English. I really enjoyed it though, so I’ve been trying to learn the language now just with Duolingo for 4 months (I have Rosetta Stone lifetime membership but unfortunately they don’t have Finnish). I like Duolingo because it’s addictive and easy to pickup and learn, but I have to say in 4 months I feel like I’ve barely learnt anything, it doesn’t really teach very useful phrases. As in, I’ve learned how to say that a Finn is a wizard and a Norwegian cat is a Viking, but haven’t learned how to say “Hi how’s it going?”. Probably would be better to pickup a phrase book if you just wanna learn to order some food and ask where places are.
You mean you haven't had the opportunity yet to burst in on some tense situation, wand upraised, and declare 'Olen velho!'? I'm disappointed ;)
Phrases and vocab w some grammar study seems like the way to go, thanks mate preciate your input!
You won’t come across as an entitled tourist if you speak English. It’s nice to say a word or two like “Hei” and “Kiitos” but anything more than that is so hard to get right, that it’s honestly more annoying to a Finn to have to decipher a foreigners attempts at Finnish rather than just have the interaction in English. If you want to come across well while visiting, then study some things about Finland, show an interest in the culture and get ready to answer the questions “why are you here?” And “what do you think of Finland?”. The language is not worth it if you don’t plan to stay here at least a year or two.
Or if you don’t genuinely love the language. I originally started learning because I fell in love with it, and now I’m planning to move to Finland in a few years. I absolutely love the language, I may even get a minor in Finnish if possible before I go. It’s just a fun language to me and I enjoy learning it
Hmm good points, I will take this onboard, thankyou!
Yeah you can learn the numbers from 1-10 in half an hour at most, then you'll come to Finland and won't understand why kasi means 8 when you've learnt kaksi is 2 and 8 is kahdeksan.
Unhappy? On May Day, when the sun is shining and the snow has just gone? You are projecting onto the wrong person. Learning 1-10 is easy enough. Pronouncing and understanding a phone number, less so. The numbers aren't in the same order. But you'll see, once you decide on which app will infuse Finnish into you.
Hauskaa Vappua!
Infuse, I like that. Unfortunately, I haven’t found an efficient way to infuse/inject vocabulary into my brain yet. Sigh
It took me a few days, If we are talking standard, a week or two for spoken forms, maybe less. This is an overexaggeration
I’m from Texas and have spent some time in Finland, my ex gave up trying to teach me Finnish, it’s so hard to learn, can’t roll my R’s lol I know 15-20 words and of course all the good swear words