In my last official meeting to finish the course we talked a bit about everything. Everyone is different and faced different difficulties over the time. I can motivate myself quite well to go into verb conjugation and learning phrases and vocabulary. But I do need some help with the local cases, when it comes to the “open places” not everything is as clear as I would want it to be. The consonant graduation is also something I still struggle
with every now and then (especially when you combine my two “problem fields” of the Finnish language 😉) For example: NK – NG; sänky – sängyt – sängyssä BUT sänkyyn. [Liisa nukkuu sängyssä. / Minä menen sänkyyn.]
And this is when I’m happy to have (at least) two lovely Finns by my side who can help me with figuring out why things are like this. In this case there wasn’t really an explanation why the consonant graduation doesn’t apply, so I take it as given. It’s just like Helsingissä and Helsinkiin. Someone decided that it’s like this. I just need to remember and learn it this way. 😀
Review:
My Finnish has improved considerably since the start of the EOTO course (or coming to Finland in general) – as I would have hoped. While I still feel that I am obviously still floundering in the basics, I do now have a reasonable grasp of the grammar and my vocabulary has grown and grown. I can now construct very basic sentences. While the grammar is often not quite right, the message in the sentence can usually be understood. Moreover, I have memorised a few little phrases (which makes it sound like I know a lot more than I do!) and I really should build on those and increase them. As my vocabulary has grown, I’ve become more familiar with the grammar. I am finding that reading Finnish is getting easier: I am able to pull more and more out of passages of text. I also got a Finnish book from the TAMKO Office which functions as motivation that someday (maybe in a year) I will be able to read it and understand the general message of it. Besides learning the language, I also learned more and more about Finns and their culture. I realized that when I got more familiar with the language. I think you can’t get into the Finnish culture if you don’t have a reasonable idea about how the Finnish language works. I enjoyed this journey a lot and when I return home at the end of December, I will surely continue my Finnish studies! 😊
Comments