How I Learned Finnish (Without Studying Grammar) - Part 2
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Content
Why Reading?
Daily goal setting
Understanding spoken Finnish
What about speaking?
”Why lessons? Your wife is Finnish!”
Things have changed
My Finnish language future
We’re now about 7-8 months into my Finnish learning story. And I told you that I never really studied the grammar. How did I do that? Is it even possible?
Especially since Finnish has 15 cases and seemingly infinite amount of endings to the words.
Initially, I didn’t decide that I wasn’t gonna touch a grammar book. I actually thought about buying one for a while. But I also thought it would be a fun challenge and kind of an “experiment” to just see how far I could get without studying grammar.
I wanted to try to see if I could just absorb the language naturally and intuitively. But it was honestly a very lighthearted thing and something I just wanted to try for fun. I think having a sense of “play" is an important key when learning a language. Makes it much more enjoyable.
And personally I’m not someone who likes to read about the theory of a language or grammar. It’s fine for people that are into that, but I want to just get the language inside of me and be able to communicate using it. That’s my goal.
And I’m even though I draw a lot of inspiration from the great language learners out there, I like to put my own twist on things when learning a language to keep it interesting for me.
So after finishing the Suomen Mestari series (check out Part 1 for more about that) it was now time for the next step.
Reading content that I personally found interesting was the way I decided to go.
Why reading?
If you want to know why reading is so effective for language learning then check out my post: 5 reasons Reading is the Fastest Way to Learn a Language.
I had decided that my approach to learning Finnish was gonna be to focus on reading for 3 reasons:
1.) I had heard how effective it was to learn a language.
2.) I got to read about things and topics I was interested in instead of boring textbooks.
3.) I wanted something simple that I could do every day without having to think “what am I doing today?”. To establish a simple and fail-proof routine was important because I was also learning Cantonese at the same time.
So I went ahead and bought an e-book, drag-and-dropped it into LingQ (use this link to get 37% off LingQ. It’s free to sign up and try it out first) and I just started reading. It was the autobiography of Steve Lukather, guitar player and singer of the band Toto (my favorite band ever).
It was definitely slow and quite challenging in the beginning to read. But I really didn’t mind. I was just excited that I was reading something I was interested in and I just knew it was gonna be effective. And just the feeling of actually reading a real book in Finnish was exhilarating to me.
It took me a few months to get through the book. The amount I read each day varied, but I set a “Daily Goal” in LingQ for a certain number of words. This kept me motivated to keep my daily streak going and made sure I did at least something even on the days I didn’t feel like it as much.
But honestly, most days I felt like it. When you read something that falls into the area of your passions and interests then the learning just becomes a by-product of consuming content that is interesting to you.
This reading habit is something I’ve kept up to this day and I’m now on my 10th book in Finnish. I’ve read everything from KonMari books about organizing your home, two of the Witcher books, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s life story, Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules For Life” and books about the DISC-personality types.
Daily goal setting
In the beginning I set a goal to read 25 or maybe 50 “new words” per day. No matter what I always read at least that amount.
And when you’re first starting out with native content you’re going to hit this number very quickly. I would often find myself reading hundreds of new words each day.
I was just enjoying what I was doing.
I never did any flashcards or repetition or vocabulary. I wasn’t trying to learn anything. I just read the books. Sometimes I might have to re-read a sentence once or twice, but soon as I understood the meaning - I moved on.
It didn’t matter if I understand how all the 15 cases functioned in the sentence or anything like that. I knew it would eventually start making more and more sense. Not necessarily intellectually, but instinctively. Which is all you need to be able to speak and understand a language.
Understanding spoken Finnish
The difference between written and spoken Finnish is actually a lot bigger than in most languages. And it takes time to get used to.
I found that having that reading foundation helped me a lot because the spoken language is usually just shortened or a bit simplified versions of the words.
There’s more to it than that but in essence that’s what it is. I just never worried about it.
I never actually intentionally practiced input through listening after the initial stage of Finnish (except for the little amount I would get through my speaking sessions - which we’ll soon get to).
There were 2 reasons for this.
1.) Comparatively, I didn’t find the language that difficult to understand once I knew the words through reading.
The words are so long and that it gives you a lot of time to understand them, unlike with Cantonese where listening comprehension is a real challenge.
2.) When you’re learning 2 languages at the same time you have to prioritize time-wise.
And I would also get quite intensive input-sessions when visiting or being visited by my wife’s family who all speak Finnish. It was quite challenging to understand, but I knew that I would get better and better. It was just a matter of time.
And just knowing that my Finnish improved between each visit, even if it was just slightly, motivated me a lot. Especially motivating was it to be able to communicate with my wife’s grandparents as they speak only Finnish.
What about speaking?
Maybe a month or two after I started reading books with LingQ I started to take lessons with iTalki (get $10 free iTalki credit).
Even though my wife (who by now in the story I was engaged with) spoke Finnish I didn’t practice much with her at all. Learning Finnish was my own thing.
And I think it’s very important that we have that mentality when learning a language. No one can teach us a language. So it’s up to us to take ownership and proactively go after it.
And I also felt it’s so nice to just book a 1-on-1 lesson with someone who is only there to patiently listen and help me navigate the language for an hour as I stumble trying to express myself in this new language.
I took a lesson once a week or so for a few months (read more about my methods for online lessons in my post: How to Get the Most Out of Your Online Lessons). It was a good way to get to practice and get used to spoken Finnish, as it’s quite different from the written language.
It was challenging to speak Finnish in the beginning and I actually think speaking is the most challenging part of Finnish. Quite a few tongue twisters, but mostly because of the grammar. It can be a bit of a jungle in the beginning to know which form of the word to use since there are so many different options.
Did this make me want to study the grammar? Nope. I just kept making mistakes and slowly progressing. Trusting that with enough exposure my brain would start to internalize the patterns and make sense of the language.
You can learn the grammar on a more unconscious level without begin able to understand or explain the rules. It comes with enough exposure. Piece by piece it all starts making feel more and more natural.
The lessons were mostly just conversation practice as that’s what I prefer most of the time. At the time I was also getting married in a few months so I also worked on a 5-minute wedding speech entirely in Finnish with the help of my teachers (huge shoutout to Stefano & Sabrin over at iTalki!)
This was a great way to learn as I got to put my thoughts into words and then with the help of my tutors form it into Finnish. I then memorized the whole speech.
I seriously must have repeated the speech out loud 100 times if not more (I had a lot of time to myself during those long car trips from Sweden to Finland that I was doing a lot when we were engaged).
At the wedding party I was able to deliver the speech completely without notes. It was a very special moment. Especially for my bride who had no idea I had prepared it.
Me holding my Finnish speech in honor of my beautiful wife Heta at our wedding party.
Picture: Viivi N. Media
My stunningly beautiful bride listening to the speech.
Picture: Viivi N. Media
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”Why lessons? Your wife is Finnish!”
This is an interesting one. Maybe for some people that works. But me and my wife have only spoken English with each other since day 1 and the dynamic of teacher/student didn’t work very well for us (does anyone relate haha?).
When I talked to her I just wanted to focus on communicating, not practicing a language. And communication and avoiding misunderstandings is extra important especially in the beginning of marriage.
And I also think it was a combination of maturity in our relationship (not trying to fix each other lol) and also just me reaching a more comfortable level in Finnish before we started using it more with each other.
I’ve just always found it very comfortable to pay for someone to listen to me as I stumble and struggle trying to speech. That person is there to listen to me with patience and there’s no need to be able to communicate anything in particular like I might need to with my wife.
So that’s why I’ve had somewhere around 30-40 iTalki lessons over the course of my Finnish learning journey. Had I not been learning Cantonese at the same time I would have for sure taken probably twice as many iTalki lessons.
Things have changed
Now (May 2021) I’m at a place 2.5 years in where I can actually have meaningful discussion in Finnish. I attribute this mostly to my reading habit. Just the massive amount of exposure is so so beneficial. My iTalki lessons have also been very helpful in my development of being more fluid in my speaking.
These days me and my wife speak more and more Finnish (and some Swedish too as she’s also learning my native language - so fun!). English is still the language we use for the majority of the time, but whenever we’re around people and want to be private - we switch to Finnish.
And it works very well for us.
I think it’s super fun to have these 3 different languages that we can speak with each other. They each have their own personalities from each other and we get to see different sides of each other that way.
My Finnish language future
Hope you enjoyed enjoyed reading about my story of learning Finnish! And that it was helpful for your own language learning to get a window into what the journey can look like.
It get’s really fun when you get to the stage where I’m currently at in Finnish. I can speak and understand much better and reading books feels very smooth comfortable (it was uncomfortable for a long time).
My Finnish is far from perfect, but that doesn’t matter to me. I know I’m improving and I’m in no rush as I know this beautiful language and culture will be with me for the rest of my life. Something I feel very proud and honored about.
To find out about what I did next on my Finnish fluency journey (especially to improve grammar naturally), read this and this post.
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Do any of you have a spouse/partner that has a different native language than you? That you have learned or are currently learning? What has your experience speaking the language with them been like?
Comment below. Would love to hear your stories!
