Alive and kicking

Not everybody thinks that Finnish is a language spoken only by elder people. John Kaye spent a year in Helsinki and learned to speak perfect Finnish. The hardest thing to understand? Why “kreisi” Finnish teenagers prefer to infiltrate their “slangi” with borrowed words from English, Sweden and Russian.

You seldom meet people like John Kaye.
Young man from Bradford, Ontario, spent a year living in Helsinki, Finland.

When he came back, he spoke perfect Finnish. Impeccable and fluent and well pronounced.

What is even more striking is that Kaye did all this without any previous contact with the Finns or Finnishness.

Obscure language was an interesting challenge

John Kaye first arrived in Helsinki on August 2006. Couple of months before he had applied to Rotary Youth Exchange.

– Finland was actually not my first choice, but I wanted to go to someplace not so ordinary. I wanted something unique. Anybody can go to France or Germany, but not too many people choose a country like Finland, Kaye explains.

Kaye lived with two different families in Finland. Both of them located in Lauttasaari neighbourhood in Western Helsinki.

In Lauttasaari Kaye went to school with the rest of the Finnish youth.

– When I heard that I was going to Finland I decided that I want to learn the language. I bought couple of CDs and a book titled “Teach yourself Finnish” before I arrived in Helsinki.

Kaye participated to Finnish language courses from three to four times a week. He also tried to speak as much Finnish as possible with his host family.

– Of course I had some difficulties at first. For example Finnish syntax is very different from English.

Kaye tells that he felt like he could not say anything at all. But that feeling soon went away.
By Christmas holidays Kaye had absorbed so many new words that he felt confident communicating in Finnish.

His Finnish skills were further improved when he moved to his second host family.

There the mother and the daughter of the family were shy to use their English because they felt that Kaye’s Finnish was way more fluent than their English.
– For me that was actually a very good thing, Kaye laughs.

Come on, is it really worth all the pain?

– I definitely think it is worth it, says Kaye.
Kaye admits that at first he pondered if there was any sense at all in learning Finnish, a bizarre East European language spoken by mere 5 million people around the globe.

– I thought to myself that what am I going to do with my Finnish skills anyway?

But now those thoughts seem like a distant past to him.

– Now I have two families and so many dear friends in Finland that I could not do without Finnish.

Kaye is actually heading back to Helsinki next summer. He will be working as a tourist guide in Kauppatori, which is a popular landing spot for tourists arriving with huge cruise ships all day long.
Most of them are not from Finland so Kaye’s Finnish may not be that useful after all.

But no worries: Kaye can help them also in Russian, German or Mandarin Chinese. And of course English.
Kaye, who now studies languages at the university back in Canada, won't probably have hard time in finding a job in his life.

– Language is always important when you want to know something about the culture.

Here in Canada, many second and third generation Finns have forgotten how to speak Finnish.

Kaye says he cannot give any hints how to learn the language fast. Yet he suspects the some of the young people do not see how vibrant the Finnish language truly is.

– My guess is that when you go to Finland you slowly start to realize that the language is the key to vibrant Finnish youth culture. Finnish is not just some old dying language that you have inherited by an accident from your parents, Kaye analyses.

Compound words and idioms are hard to learn

Kaye thinks that the hardest things in Finnish language are its long compound words, which seem to go on and on and on...

As many others before him, Kaye finds Finnish numbers especially funny.

– Kahdeksantuhattaseitsemän-sataaneljäkymmentäkolme, he says.

According to Kaye, Finland is also very idiomatic language.

– I have hard time adapting to English again. When I say that I’m totally in the garden, nobody understands me here, Kaye laughs.

And then there was this thing with the funky Nordic letters ä and ö. They were difficult.

– They were a bit tricky at first. When I visited a public sauna in Lauttasaari, people were urging me to say: “Heitä lisää löylyä!” That was very difficult to pronounce.

Eventually everything worked out well for Kaye. His Finnish is top notch. Some people just do speak in languages.

Text: Aleksi Moisio
Photo: Jani Autio