I have always been bad at keeping a diary (or a blog) because I’m not used to sit down in the evening and write about my day. So this is going to be a one-day pop-up blog about my twelve meetings during the spring with Nadiia, an Ukranian girl who taught me Russian and who I taught Finnish. Thankfully we wrote down the topics of our meetings so via them I can recall what we did and what I thought about it.
Nadiia and I met for the first time in January. It was exciting to meet her because before we had just sent each other email and whatsapp-messages. I learned that she was from Ukrania, studying in Poland and had come to TAMK as an exchange student to study tourism. She was visiting Finland for the first time. In this meeting we planned when we would meet and what we would teach each other.
I had taken one course of Russian basics but it had been more than a year ago so a lot of it had gone from my mind. I basically knew most of the cyrillic alphabet and remembered some words and basic phrases. (Though I got to say that I barely understood anything when Russian people spoke.) We planned that Nadiia would rehearse the basics with me and then she would teach me new words.
Nadiia knew nothing at all about Finnish language so I was going to start from the beginning with hellos etc. However, I thought she had the privilege to be in Finland and hear the natives speak the language every day.
At the end of the meeting we visited the school library together to get some study books for Russian and Finnish. We planned the next meeting and then went on different paths. I thought that this was going to be an interesting spring and I felt motivated and full of energy!
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