=)
So back to the question in the post title: Puhutteko suomea?
Ei, en puhu… (Unfortunately)
But I’m trying to learn it.
When you move to a different
country, things are much easier if you understand the local language. The
language barrier can make you feel disconnected from what’s around you.
Considering Finland, there are a few reasons why immigrants often don’t bother
to learn Finnish:
1. Finnish is not a global language,
so if you’re not planning to stay in Finland for a very long time, it seems
pointless to put so much effort into learning a new language that you can’t use
elsewhere.
2. Almost all Finns speak English,
and that makes foreigners a bit lazy when it comes to learning Finnish.
Even knowing that I’ll be in
Finland for less than a year, I’ll try to learn as much as I can in the
meantime. Finnish is an interesting and beautiful language. It’s very different
from Portuguese or English. Or any other language (they say Finnish is only
similar to Estonian).
The common sense says that
Finnish is difficult to learn. Some people even say that it’s the most
difficult language in the world. But I’m pretty sure that they are exaggerating
(a lot!).
The fact that it doesn’t relate
to other languages makes it a bit difficult to learn. However, the letters are
the same, and pronunciation is very similar to Portuguese. For that reason, I
feel much happier to learn Finnish than I would be if I needed to learn Chinese
or Russian, for example.
Another characteristic of Finnish
language is that it is an agglutinative language, which means that prepositions
and other such words are used as suffixes instead of being a separate word.
That has been the biggest challenge for me so far.
I believe I won’t be able to
learn Finnish as well as I’d like to, but if I can at least go to a ravintola
(restaurant), read the ruokalista (menu) and choose between liha (meat) and
kala (fish), I’ll be happy!
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