Meat. Bread. Dog.

There comes a point in every person's study of a particular language where you know just enough to be dangerous and I think I have reached that point recently. Learning languages as an adult is a grueling adventure both in humiliation and almost juvenile glee when you manage to say something correctly or post a letter without a quizzical look from the postal clerk behind the desk. We pack into two years what children take 10 years to learn with a far more supple and receptive brain than our older, abused and jaded ones.

I used to think that I was reasonably good at languages having learned English and German at a young age, taken 8 years of Latin in all those joyless years of Catholic schooling and had an adult reading and writing level by the time I was in first grade. I managed to squeeze in 2 years of Russian in University since the masters program I was aiming for required 2 modern languages with a scientific emphasis, but I've forgotten much of that since then. Finnish, I thought, wouldn't be terribly difficult to learn since it would be so utterly foreign and new that I wouldn't mix it up with German as I have with other languages in the past. Wrong-o pal, this language is off the scale in terms of disappearing and reappearing letters and words as wide as this page with more vowels than consonants. You want comedy, just try looking up a word in the dictionary! Hours of laughs there, yessiree. [ I can hear the Finns snickering already :) ] The spoken and the written language are very different, but even read from a page, my eyes glaze over as I listen to the teacher read from our book while trying to grasp for any word or sound that is familiar and word-like. I can read the text but...what in the hell is she saying? Right. The Ents were a flight of wishful fantasy after Tolkien visited Finland.

This is not to say that I don't understand that English is a pain in the ass to learn after a certain age since the entire language is just a pastiche of idioms with few rules to comfort those poor sods who have to learn it the hard way, but 2,000 different forms for a verb? Even English is not so cruel. :) Not to mention, in the US, the import of Finnish films, books, TV programmes, etc. are vastly disproportionate to those of English. Hell, most Yankees don't even know where Finland is much less what currency or language they speak. So, instead of getting to watch all the movies and such to soak up the language at an early age like the Finns do, we aliens are left to learn Finnish with adult expectations but with corny kiddie dialogues in textbooks and videos.

I'm sure the Finnish for Foreigners teachers have a koffee klatsch every week where they swap amusing stories about their student's futile endeavours to crack the code and tormented self-immolation. Finnish is like a cipher with a one-time pad since no key ever works twice. You only thought that was accusative but it's really genitive! Or, well, we change all the letters around, remove a few, add some endings then only speak the first 2 syllables since surely the first few letters should be enough! :) Welcome to the cryptogram. However, this is where the Komedy comes in as you learn just enough to think you have a handle on things only to be reminded that you are still a stupid outlander, please come back in 20 years when you know a thing or two. Two situations when I was out walking HB recently did just that.

HB looks a bit like a dogcow, an urban bovine, so I've heard the jokes before from people saying, "MOO", etc. The other morning I was walking HB to the park and a little boy tagging rather hyperactively alongside his mother with a pram exclaimed, "LIHAVA!", and pointed to HB. In my pre-caffeineated daze I smiled and nodded. When I got around the corner I thought, hey, that jumped-up little kid just called my dog MEAT! I thought it strange since, as far as I knew, Finland doesn't have dogs on the menu and that kid looked pretty well fed to me. Then again, the family didn't have a dog with them so maybe they ate it for dinner the night before. When I got back home I mentioned to Jarkko that some cheeky little fat kid called HB meat, lihava. Jarkko proceeded to explain that while liha=meat, lihava=fat or meaty. Still, what was that kid on about calling my dog fat or meaty. I should think up something to say to him the next time I see him such as, "Hey!, He is awfully meaty isn't he? We're planning to have him for dinner next week!".

HB is old and he has embraced the role of grumpy old fart rather enthusiastically. Often he will decide that he has had quite enough walk and flop down on the sidewalk with a glare in my direction. We usually have a brief stand-off where I stand and glare back at him but, he weighs more than me and he usually wins. This also invites people to look in our direction and squint at me like some ASPCA fugitive on the lam. Two girls walked by during just such a meeting of the wills the other day and one said, "Onko se leipää?". I just smiled and nodded and thought to myself . o 0 { why did she just ask me if he was bread? }. I figured, considering the meat incident, that I would ask Jarkko what the deal with the bread was about. Well, we went through the usual verbal charade where I try to mimic what I hear along with some context and Jarkko tries to figure out what people have said and he came up with "lepää", an unfamiliar form of a word which means "resting" from the root "levätä". The difference to the untrained ear on the street in traffic is so small as to be insignificant. Komedy!

So, tomorrow we're off to English speaking space where I hope I don't explode with conversation after spending most of my time at home trying to avoid the eye-rolling, etc. at the hands of those who find foreigners who don't speak Finnish rather tedious and only venture out to get my humiliation in Finnish class. I'll be like a puppy set free in the park around other puppies. I also need to stop spelling words with 'k' instead of 'c' except for Amerikka which I consider to be an improvement upon the English spelling. :)

1 Oct 2003 at 11:35, Helsinki