Finnish is a 1000+ Puzzles
He looked at the pile of newspapers and other ad brochures, then grabbed a newspaper. He read it intentionally, lifted his head, and smile at me.
“I can read the newspaper!”
This is what he had proudly proclaimed to several people he met, and they usually responded,
“Wow! Your Finnish must be good.”
His answer?
“Since we arrived in Oulu, I have been reading it because Finnish uses Latin characters like Indonesian and I am not blind, of course, I can read it. But understanding is a different story.”
My man!
My hubby is a person, I can say, that is very talented in learning a new language. After living only 3 months in Enschede, Netherlands, he communicated with local people at the market in Dutch.
The way he learned was very simple. Every day he spent an hour watching a television program in Dutch with English subtitles. He did not care about the story. His brain made a connection between these two languages, formulated the patterns, and bingo…he understood Dutch grammar and vocabulary in a very simple way.
When he had a conference in South Korea, he spent about three days examining the patterns he heard on the bus with the words on a screen. Thus he managed to read Korean characters successfully. But, as in Finnish, do not ask him the meaning of the sentence he read! Well, he was only there a week, but it was amazing to see how he learned it from scratch!
What about Finnish?
Unlike me, he only took a 16-hour basic Finnish course at the university. It was a course which met twice a week, each time for an hour.
He practiced the way he learned Dutch, by watching television. But many times he became confused and asked me or our children.
“What is the meaning of the word?”
“What is the basic form of it?”
“Why does it change to become that?”
“Why should the change take place?”
Sometimes we managed to answer the first and second questions directly, but many times we looked at an online translation. But the third and fourth questions, most of the time, we could not answer.
It was interesting, because even though he sometimes asked a Finn, the third and fourth questions remained unanswered.
One day he told me that learning a language is like finding the pieces of a puzzle and putting the whole things together to create a picture. It is the analogy of finding the patterns and putting them in their proper place. But right now he has not found the proper Finnish puzzle pattern yet.
Like me, he tried to practice speaking Finnish, as he only needed everyday-life vocabulary.
Once he went to the doctor. After the treatment the doctor prescribed him medication, and he asked her,
“Kuinka matka?”
The doctor looked at him, totally confused and asked,
“Tarkoitatko, kuinka maksaa?”
Intending to ask, ’how much is it?’, he asked, ‘how to travel?’
Well, I think all of us have our own story about learning a new language. Though if you have never uttered such an embarrassing “tongue-twister”, you probably have never practiced speaking.
Even though he made many mistakes in pronunciation and grammar, he has never stopped learning.
The last time we discussed learning Finnish, he told me,
“Finnish is like a puzzle with a lot of pieces, which are challenging to put together properly to create a big picture”
Imagine you have two sets of puzzles with the same picture. One set consists of 100 pieces and the other is 100,000 pieces. Which one is easier and quicker to assemble?
Nonetheless, learning Finnish is possible, as possible as it is to assemble a 100,000 piece puzzle. The perseverance to meet the challenge pays off in the end.
