Meeting 8 Finnish-German: Cooking something Finnish

Last night our Finnish-German girls’ group met for the eighth time, so unfortunately there are only two meetings left. However, last evening, we finally managed to cook something Finnish! Actually, we had planned to make salmon soup, but since it would have taken too much time, Jasmin suggested making “makaronilaatikko” with grated carrots instead, as this is a very typical Finnish dish according to her.

The cooking was once again a lot of fun together and we listened to German music throughout the evening. Nevertheless, it took 1.5 hours until we could eat, so we were able to talk about a lot of topics. These included German chocolate, a lot about the music we listened to, Formula 1 and German and Finnish music festivals. The food tasted very good, especially with lots of ketchup, although I found it a bit unusual to have raw carrots on the side. In Germany, we also often eat vegetables with a meal, but they are usually prepared as a salad. Jasmin then served us some of the cheese she likes to eat and for dessert we had Toffifee, which I had received from my family. All in all, the evening with food was a complete success.

After dinner we played Alias, which is called Tabu in Germany. Jasmin had got the children’s version for it, so there were pictures on the cards and we didn’t have to know the Finnish word. We then explained the words to each other in German and Jasmin helped us pronounce the Finnish words correctly afterwards. In between, when we talked briefly about something or explained something, we always switched to English. That really showed me for the first time how difficult it is to constantly switch between two languages. Sometimes I started talking in English while explaining the words and didn’t even notice. Nevertheless, playing the game was a lot of fun and I learned some new words and also discovered some similarities between the Finnish and German languages. Often, both the German words and the Finnish words consisted of compound words. For example, “Regen_Schirm” and “sateen_varjo” or “Schreibtisch_Stuhl” and “työ_tuoli”. Sometimes there is hardly any difference between Finnish and German words, such as “Korb” and “Kori” or “Elefant” and “Elefantti”. I found it particularly difficult to pronounce words that had the letter Y in them very often, such as the word “lyijykynä”, because this letter hardly ever occurs in German.

As always, the evening was a lot of fun, I learned a lot and the almost four hours we spent together flew by! I’m really looking forward to our little hike on Saturday!

 

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