Mitä on viisikirjaiminen

When you move to a new place to live there is a myriad of things to get used to; where to shop, where to eat, where to have fun, customs, etc. Moving to a different country adds a decidedly different dimension to this and when that country doesn't have English as a first or second language it becomes a whole different order of adjustment. Everything you once took for granted becomes a challenge. There's nothing like feeling proud of posting a letter at the post office to make you feel 12 again. Perhaps becoming an expat is the real fountain of youth.

Finland has a very small number of foreigners and it certainly isn't because it isn't an attractive place to call home, but it might be largely due to the language. Anyone who claims that Finnish is easy is either a linguistic savant, hasn't tried to learn it or moved here before the age of 18 or so. An American who managed to get into Helsinki University recently, and who asked what Yliopisto meant afterwards, seems to think that he'll be able to manage classes taught in Finnish after attending a month of language instruction before the fall term begins. It's unlikely he's a linguistic genius so we're going to enjoy every drop of schadenfreude we can get when reality sinks in. Learning Finnish is the 'Sisu Test' for foreigners as those who have the sisu to learn it will stay and those who don't will bugger off back from whence they came.

I'm back in Finnish classes for the summer and it's interesting to notice that I'm always one of very few, if any, other native English speakers. People who don't speak English at all have a lot more incentive to learn Finnish quickly, but even then they seem to be having as much trouble with the language as I do. I don't quite understand the English speakers who, after more than 2 years of living here, have never taken a class or manage to read a Finnish menu at a restaurant. I mean, I may suck at Finnish, but I like to eat and the food words were the first ones I learned. It seems like there is a giant gap between those who are fluent and those who can't read a menu and I think I'm starting to understand why as I waver between despair and the edge of hope on my prospects of merely being adequate in a few years.

Finns, of course, usually say that Finnish is easy. I've often thought English, insane language that it is, is easy, too. Native languages are like that since you don't really have a choice when you're a kid and need to learn language so that you can tell your parents to piss off, make friends and heckle the class nerds in school. However, when you arrive in a place where 8 years of Latin classes delivered by a nun with a ruler and the wrath of god doesn't do fuckall for making any sense of Finnish, it makes you want to learn all the swear words first. What compounds the difficulty of learning Finnish is the fact that just about everyone under the age of 35 in Helsinki knows enough English to make it easy to get by without learning Finnish and often Finns will start speaking English automatically if they hear that you're not a native speaker. Unless you're really determined to learn Finnish, you won't. I've even had Finns ask me "Why?" when I've said that I'm studying the language. Well, gee, maybe it's because 95% of everything is written in Finnish here and I doubt that English will supplant the official language anytime soon.

Above all things that make me irate about trying to learn Finnish and finding it difficult is how impossible it is to actually speak the language with actual humans. The courses at the university focus almost wholly on grammar which, while excellent to have, isn't terribly useful for people who actually want to speak and use the language. I never had to speak Latin so I'm very self-conscious about saying the wrong thing or having someone roll their eyes at me in response to a stupid foreigner. I listen a lot and sometimes get the chops to try asking for something without sounding like too much of an idiot. Two steps forward, one step back. I understand a lot of what I hear, if not literally, at least in context so when I get confused looks or the dreaded "Mitä?" I get pretty frustrated. This happens particularly often at cafés and on the telephone.

scene: coffee shop
players: clerk and customer [me]

• clerk - Moi
• customer - Moi. Saanko iso kahvia ja korvapuusti.
• clerk - Mitä?
• customer - Saanko iso kahvia ja korvapuusti.
• clerk - Mitä?
• customer - Saanko iso kahvia ja korvapuusti.
• clerk - Mitä?
• customer - Saanko iso kahvia ja korvapuusti?
• clerk - Mitä?
• customer - Uhhh...a large coffee and korvapuusti?
• clerk - Ah. That will be 3 and 40. Here you are. Hello.
• customer - Kiitos. [with confused look and skulks off into a dark corner trying not to look so much like a idiot.]

Aside from my getting the case wrong, what part of the context of that transaction could be so difficult for the person to understand? I've been told I don't butcher the language pronunciation so horribly to be impossible to understand so what part about being a clerk in a shop that sells coffee and bakery products with someone asking for iso kahvia and korvapuusti makes it so damned difficult to click? Maybe English is simply far more forgiving when Finns apply the phonetic rules of their language to English and it takes me a moment to figure out what they're saying to which I usually repeat the word in the sentence as it should be pronounced without saying, "WHAT?!" I mean, c'mon, I'm in a coffee shop ordering a coffee and a pastry, WORK WITH ME. It's not a random experience, so either the language is a lot more rigid than the difference between the spoken and the written forms would lead one to believe or this is Finland's way of telling foreigners to fuck off to somewhere other than Finland. It's incredibly difficult to go from being pumped full of grammar to actually speaking a language with any kind of confidence, especially when you've never heard the language in question before you set foot in the country. "Mitä?" is a 5-letter word which dashes what small amount of confidence we might have.

So, while there is a wide variance on how quickly and easily people learn Finnish, it seems pretty common for English speakers to be the last group to pick it up since Finns make it easy in some form or another not to bother or to give up in despair. When given the choice between working hard at something and failing versus embracing the sloth within and just speaking English, it's a pretty obvious path of least resistance. I refuse to give up though and I'm going to start fighting back. The next time someone can't figure out in a coffee shop that I'm ordering a large coffee and a korvapuusti and says "Mitä?" more than twice, I'm going to give them something worthy of such confusion: "Ilmatyynyalukseni on täynnä ankeriaita!" I will practise this phrase in front of the mirror until it is perfect and then I shall deploy it at will. I'll either get another "Mitä?" or a smile from a fellow Douglas Adams fan.

Finland, cut us English speakers some slack as at least a few of us are trying to learn Finnish even though your English sucks less than our Finnish.