I Am a Polar Bear

Blogmas is over! If all has gone to plan, I’ve been back from Germany just under six days and you should already have five posts on the subject – and now real time has caught up to blog time, yes, you do! So today I’m going to talk about something different: my Finnish language progress.

I’ve been learning it semi-seriously for six months for my Bronze Maverick Award, which is a spin-off of the Rebel badges. The Rebel badges exist because adults wanted Brownie badges. The Maverick Awards exist because adults wanted the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. One of the sections is My Skills and I decided to learn Finnish.

I picked Finnish because it’s a big gap in my European language proficiency. I have a degree in French and Spanish, I picked up some tourist German while living in Switzerland, I’ve been learning Norwegian on and off since late 2016 and I can decipher Cyrillic letters, although reading the Russian or Ukrainian behind them is often beyond me (you’d be surprised how often there’s a recognisable English word there though).

But with Finnish, all I see is a sea of double letters, umlauts and far too many vowels. I did three months of Duolingo last year to attempt to make sense of Finnish but then I encountered cases and I immediately gave it up. I knew that during these six months, they’d come up and I’d have to plough through – not just plough through, but plough through teaching myself from a book.

I didn’t want to use Duolingo this time. It’s handy for the basics and for hearing people say the new words out loud but it doesn’t teach – it expects you to divine things from context, and it teaches nonsense sentences like “the mouse is writing the newspaper”. In Norwegian, I found it was handy for teaching me word order without actually teaching. I couldn’t explain why I knew that this sentence felt correct but this one didn’t, but I couldn’t possibly say why. Why is “it’s raining” det regner but “today’s its raining” is i dag regner det? Why do “regner” and “det” swap places? (It’s something to do with verb-second construction, I think). But for actually teaching you to speak the language – well, I’ve heard plenty of people rave about how much Duolingo they’ve done, how long their streak is, how many years they’ve been doing it – but also how many people have added that they can’t actually hold even a beginner’s conversation.

So I decided to use the Teach Yourself Complete Finnish book. I’ve used the Complete Norwegian book and got on ok with that, so there was no reason why it shouldn’t work with Finnish. I had over-ambitious plans to get through twelve chapters in the six months. Two a month, no problem.

Well, it was a problem!

Month 1

In month 1, I did get through the first two – they covered things like introducing yourself, talking about where you’re from, taking the countries a little further in introducing the languages you speak and so on. I’d done some of this in Duolingo last year, so it wasn’t too much of a baptism of fire. But it did introduce cases and there was no escaping them. I have a vague idea in German they use the nominative, determinative, genitive and accusative but by chapter one of this book, I was already on the inessive and the elative. What that means is that instead of using “at” or “in” or “from”, you change the ending of words.

For example: office = toimisto. If I want to say I work in an office, I add -ssa to toimisto, so I end up with “toimistossa“, which means “in an office”. If I want to say that I stole my hole punch from an office, I add -sta, so “toimistosta“. Oh, and Finnish doesn’t use articles. No “the” or “a” or “an”. I first encountered that in Russian and it felt very alien but I’ve had time to get used to it now. And finally, Finnish only has one third-person singular pronoun. There’s no “he” or “she”, there’s just “hän”. No, it’s not like “they” in English – it’s not a plural pronoun that’s been adapted and it doesn’t have any baggage with the “how dare you defile the beautiful pure English language!” brigade. It’s just naturally gender-neutral. And yes, Finnish has a separate “it” (se).

Month 2

That’s the easy bit. In month 2, we moved on to telling the time. That meant I had to start learning numbers and that’s not so bad. Once you’ve learned 1-10, you just add stuff on the end to get all the other numbers. -toista is the teens, -kymmentä for the tens, -sataa for the hundreds, -tuhatta for the thousands. I’m still inclined to count slowly and stumble over four and six in particular, but I made a point of counting my swimming lengths in Finnish over the later part of the summer.

Adding the time to that is a relatively simple matter, except with the halves. I’ve encountered this in germanic/northern European languages before. Half five, for example, is actually half to five, which means it’s 4:30. This causes massive confusion with English speakers in those countries and Finnish does it too. It didn’t help that there are errors in the answer section of my book – the most notable translates puoli viisi as 4:40, which really threw me because even I, even at this early stage, knew that was wrong. Of course, you can just use nelja kolmekymmentä, literally four-thirty when puoli viisi is too confusing.

Month 3

Month 3! Directions! I’d done directions in Duolingo last year but these were very different directions. Duolingo does things like “is this the right church” and “the market square is over there” and the book is very into conversations about where in Helsinki various streets are, with lots of “behind” and “on the corner of” and “near the Glass Palace” – and more cases! There’s no “in/on/to” – no, I had to make sense of the adessive and allative cases now. If something is on Mannerheimintie (tie = road), you don’t say “on” Mannerheimintie, you say “Mannerheimintiellä” and you add -lle for “to”. It sounds so easy! I couldn’t name or explain the cases but in context, I could figure out how to use them. Except this is a whole new language and I’m teaching myself from a book and it takes time to embed it all in my head and it’s not going in quite yet. We also covered plurals and like in French, everything has to match your noun so your adjectives have to become plural too. I believe Finnish uses grammatical gender but the book is merciful and I haven’t encountered it yet. Good thing too, with no articles (le/la or el/la etc) to help me remember what word is what gender.

Month 4

In month 4 I got discouraged. The book moves too fast, or maybe I’m going through it too fast. I’d already realised two chapters a month was too much but I was barely making it through one chapter because there’s too much and I just didn’t want to pick it up. Too much grammar, too much vocab, too much learning and I don’t know how to do it properly on my own. I got on OK with this book in Norwegian. Admittedly, nowhere near as regularly as I’d planned but it didn’t feel like gibberish as I moved through the chapters, even when I accidentally skipped one. Why was I having so much difficulty with Finnish, then?

The answer seems to be that I don’t have the reasonably solid grounding in Finnish that I have in Norwegian. I’d done a good few years of very irregular Duolingo and a Futurelearn/University of Oslo self-led online course before I ever picked up Complete Norwegian. The situations and vocab were new, the grammar was new but it was things like an instinctive understanding of syntax, like the word order example I gave at the beginning. Well, not instinctive. I’d been given enough sentences over the years to know what order the words go in long before I had any idea why.

So what I needed was a more solid foundation. Duolingo. The trouble is for every mistake you lose a heart and when you’ve lost that day’s five hearts you either have to give up or you have to use your hard-earned gems to buy more. It costs 450 gems for five hearts. On a good day, I can earn ten gems. Fifteen on an amazing one. So I wasn’t enjoying Duolingo either. I put off doing lessons.

Month 5

At the end of October, at the beginning of month 5, I finally did what Duolingo had wanted me to do all along. I paid for two months of Super Duolingo which, amongst other things, removes the heart system altogether. Oh, the difference it makes when you take away that fear of failure! In the first six days I upgraded at least three Skills to Legendary – in free Duolingo, each skill, or module, has five levels and the skill turns gold when you complete level 5. Now I could add an extra one. I flew back through old skills where I’d previously struggled. Now I could get things wrong as often as I wanted until what was correct stuck. I could repeat, repeat, repeat. Drum the words into my brain. See how the sentences are formed. Spot patterns, even if I don’t know the technical explanation for them yet.

But two days into that, Duolingo suddenly changed the system. The tree vanished and was replaced with the “new learning path”. That corralled everything into units and it had converted what I’d done, colouring things in either the unit colour or in gold, depending on whether I’d completed them to level 5 or to Genius, which is the bonus level which used to be purple if you were on the paid version. I daresay it all works fine but when I was planning to do lesson 2 of Pets 2 and suddenly I found myself in unit 10 or unit 6 or frankly, anywhere on the path, I didn’t appreciate it. I also didn’t appreciate, and still don’t, that desktop and app are different – as of today, November 16th, I’ve got one lesson in unit 10 left to turn gold and everything above it is gold. The first four lessons in unit 11 are blue because I’ve presumably touched on them before. But on desktop, everything is purple-blue down to unit 9 and then everything in unit 10 is gold, with a cup at the end begging me to level up, and the first four lessons of unit 11 are gold. Duolingo, please make them match! This makes no sense!

There are now 23 units in Duolingo’s Finnish. That’s very small compared to most languages because Finnish is new and it’s always under-resourced – no English-speaker really needs to learn Finnish. Or rather, it’s a low priority given how few people speak it natively. Given a choice between Finnish and French, or Spanish, or even one of the Scandinavian languages, people mostly don’t choose Finnish. I’m delighted to find both a Duolingo course and a Teach Yourself book! But Norwegian has 111 units and French has 199, for context on how short Finnish is. Nonetheless, I’m not going to finish it by the time this is published. Nor do I want to. If there’s one thing I learned in months 1-3, it’s that you can’t rush language-learning too much.

Anyway, month 5 went well, other than that hiccup. I took my phone in the bath and put the timer on and did 20 minutes of practice. Got things wrong over and over again until they went in my brain! Upgraded units 8 and 9 to Legendary and my plan was to finish unit 11 by the time I recorded my month 5 update. I didn’t manage that but I was only five days late. For that first month, I fairly consistently did my 20 minutes every single day. I did have a couple of weekends away with no or limited wifi or free time so I missed a little bit but I kept going. I felt like I was learning! Oh, month 5 was undoubtedly the most successful in this quest both in terms of how much I learned and how much enthusiasm I had for it.

Month 6

In my final month, my brain was starting to fry. Twenty minutes a night every night is a bit exhausting after a while and I went back to “ohhhh, do I have to??”. I kept it up until I got my 30 hours and I still learned but I definitely wasn’t absorbing it as well or as enthusiastically as I did in month 5. I was just too tired

I entered month 6 halfway through unit 11, which has a description/tagline in the new system (“form negative sentences; talk about nature”). I also did unit 12 (“express fondness; go to a coffee shop”) and unit 13 (“tell time, form sentences”). There was the slight hiccup that they changed the system again – units 1-8 became Intro to Finnish and units 9-18 became Finnish Foundations and and got re-numbered 1-10, so unit 13 is now unit 5. Thanks, Duo, I’ve loved how easy you’ve made it to keep track of my progress over the last six months!

Bits and pieces stuck. Words stuck, particular sentence-chunks stuck, ideas stuck, but I no longer had the brain space for it all to stick like it had done earlier in the endeavour. If I’ve concluded anything, it’s that the school stories were right. Overwork really can fry your brain. I should be taking it slower but doing it better. Do every lesson at my desk where I can add the words to relevant vocab lists which can then become flashcards. I did make some flashcards – I had my colours sitting on my shelf looking at me for most of the last two months. I did learn my numbers back in the summer from cards with the numbers themselves written in big pink letters. But I definitely should have crafted myself some practice resources rather than continue to plough tiredly through the units.

How much did I actually learn?

I realise this post is mostly about the pitfalls of finding and using Finnish resources rather than my actual progress. Ok. I’ve got to the end of 2022, I’ve spent six months learning Finnish. What can I do now that I couldn’t do in June?

To be honest, most of it is from Duolingo, which I’ve already said isn’t terribly practically helpful. I can ask “where is the butter?” (missä voi on?) and tell you that the wolf is running in the forest (susi juoksee metsässä) and that “grandma is hugging the happy bride” (Mummo halaa onnellista morsianta). I’ve learned that you need to add -a to something or someone you love (I love Aino/Rakastan Ainoa) (I love cheese/rakastan juustoa). I can point things out in Finnish while I’m out and about (It is a beautiful dog/se on kaunis koira) (It is night/on yö) (the sweets are all gone/karkki on loppu) (I love this naughty cat/Rakastan tätä tuhma kissaa).

So, like everyone always says, it doesn’t matter how much you learn, you still can’t hold a conversation and they’re right. There’s very little that’s directly and immediately usable. But I feel like I’m kind of getting to grips with the underpinnings of Finnish. The word order seems utterly illogical but I’m beginning to understand at least what it does. I can recognise where I need to use a case, like it or not. I’ve got a smattering of useful vocab – the food words, the cafe words, the directions words. I can probably navigate a Finnish supermarket now. I can apologise for not speaking much Finnish – which in itself probably puts me in the top 5% of native English-speaking Finnish speakers.

Oh, yeah. I can stumble my way through negative sentences. Have I mentioned that “no” is not a verb but you still have to conjugate it? It’s less “no” and more grammatically negating a sentence but I still have to remember that “no” becomes “en/et/ei/emme/ette/eivat” depending on the context I’m using it in. En puhu suomea is “I don’t speak Finnish” but Emme puhu suomea is “we don’t speak Finnish” and he eivat puhu suomea is “they don’t speak Finnish”. Finnish (the language) is a different word from Finnish (the nationality) and that applies to all languages/nationalities (suomea/suomalainen, englantia/englantilainen, ranskaa/ranskalainen etc etc. Oh, everything is difficult! Everything is different and realising that something which works in your native language doesn’t necessarily work in your new language is half the battle.

Anyway, Kiitos kun luit ja hyvää joulua (I had to Google Translate the first bit; “reading” and “for reading” are apparently utterly unrelated words!).