How to Practice Our Language Skills?

We had our first meeting today with Ella, because I had something else to do on Thursday, we moved the meeting to Wednesday this time. About half of the time, we spent using English and the other half in Finnish. Our meeting was a little over an hour and for the conveniency we had it online.

We used this time to talk about how we’re doing and to get to know each other a little better. I learned that Ella has a sister in the US and her family is planning to come here this summer. She also wishes to go back to the US for some part of the summer. Ella is super excited to meet the students from Switzerland that we’ll have an online project with later this spring.

We spent this time also to plan more closely what we’re going to do together in order to learn new things besides getting to know each other. We are going to read a book and talk about it; we will write essays that we can go through together and help each other with our grammar. We’re also planning on doing some grammar exercises together. Our plan includes also fun things like having a Finnish culture night and American culture night so that we can learn about the other culture we’re maybe not so familiar with. Our grand finale is going to be a fun day together in Särkänniemi in the beginning of May.

During today’s lesson I noticed how good it’s for me too to use my Finnish more, because even though I took this course to practice my English, my Finnish really can improve as well. I’m so used to talking in English that speaking in Finnish starts to feel weird sometimes, so I think this is really good practice to keep up my Finnish.

For our next meeting we should have found the books we’ll read so we can start discussing about those. I’ll choose something in English because even though I’ve been writing things in English a lot lately, all books I’ve read have been in Finnish. I know it’ll take some time to start the reading process in English but once I get started, I’m confident it’ll get quicker.

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