Learning Finnish - Week 1

Learn Finnish they said.

It will be fun they said.

Just kidding, no-one ever said that learning Finnish is fun. I think someone even said that it's impossible to learn.

Well, I usually tackle the things that are impossible, just to laugh in the end. ("No girls on the tourbus" And I laughed...)

So I've had my first week of Uni with my Finnish course and what can I say? It's pretty overwhelming to learn a new language. Especially if your book is in Finnish only. Literally, there is no word in german or english inside. Don't ask me why.

I once learned italian. To say I speak italian is a pretty big exaggeration. And I actually like languages, but back in school, italian killed it for me. We didn't learn any words, we didn't even have a normal book (we were one of the first school to teach italian, so there were no books for us yet), but a "Learn italian in 4 Weeks!"-Book for tourists. That's basically what we learned: To ask where the next hotel is, when the train is leaving and that we want to eat a pizza. 

I learned English in the same school. I like to think that my English is pretty good and I feel comfortable blogging in that language. I would NEVER EVER write an article in italian. Never.

So the first association when I sat in the course and looked at the book, I was reminded of learning italian and how much that sucked and that I'm actually a little ashamed that my latin is better than my italian. 

I was kind of overwhelmed and pledged that I would go learn my words every day.

On the second day of the course (the course is on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for 2hrs) we had to make an introduction of some character (say some basics like name, gender, age and job) and I struggled through mine, not being able to build on sentence, whereas the others had no problems. I know the numbers and know the system behind it (Fuck you, French, look at Finnish, THAT's how you're supposed to count, you cunt!), but it takes some time to translate the number in my head, whereas the others seemed to be able to count like it was their mother tongue. Gah.

But that's not a reason to give up...if I had given up everytime something seemed hard or I didn't get it at first glimpse (I once walked past the tourbus while searching for the tourbus.), I never would giggled myself to sleep about how easy everything was. 

I have to do the work and drop the struggle. Just try and if it doesn't work, try again, for Fuck's sake! That's how you do life.

And that's also how you learn a new language.