Newsflash: Finnish is hard. If you have just been accepted to the University of Helsinki or you’re planning to move to Finland in the near future, don’t expect to be half-fluent in about a month. It simply will not happen. Now that that’s out of the way, arm yourself with patience, have a look at these tips, and enjoy the ride!
1. Go to class as much as possible
Before moving to Finland, I studied by myself for a while and though I had the basics down. Then, I came to Helsinki, and while some words like kahvila or ravintola sounded familiar, I could not get anything that people were saying to me. Once I started going to class, however, things started to make much more sense, much more quickly. Finnish is a language where it really pays to go to class and get the basics explained to you.
2. Open your ears
However, going to class once a week and doing your homework sometimes won’t help you be fluent. Yle, the Finnish national broadcaster, uploads short news clips in simple Finnish nearly every day. The newsreaders speak very slowly and it is an extremely useful tool to learn vocabulary linked to current affairs. And after you’re done listening, you can test your reading comprehension with a short quiz! You may also find some bands or artists whose music you like to get some more spoken Finnish in your life
3. Join a club/sports class in Finnish
This step is more commonly known as “throwing yourself in the deep end”. The idea is to find something you already like doing and have a certain level of expertise in, so that it’s not too hard to follow and you can start making connections with terms you already know. For instance, if you enjoy music, find a choir or orchestra where the rehearsals are held in Finnish. It will also help to get to know some more locals and get out of the English-speaking bubble for a bit, which is also a plus!
4. Force your friends to speak to you in Finnish and speak back at them
This is perhaps the hardest of all tips. If they see you struggling, a Finn will automatically switch to English, no questions asked; they’re just trying not to make you uncomfortable, which is actually nice of them. But my recommendation here is to persevere and stubbornly stick to Finnish. And it’s totally okay not to get the right tense or case, as what you say will be understandable enough! Feeling comfortable with speaking is one of the biggest steps towards fluency in any language.
5. Enjoy it!
In order to progress, you need to have at least some kind of fondness for Finnish and a will to get better, because it does require some work. Being curious about the language will help you with learning even when you’re not actively studying. Once you get past some of its quirks and oddities, one my favorite things about Finnish is how logical it is: just by adding prefixes and suffixes, a single word can be altered to make verbs, adjectives, related nouns, and so on. This makes learning new words easy and really rewarding!