By Julie Badel
“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread” cautions the old adage. And so, a couple of years ago, I located a Finnish language class at a local university and began the struggle to learn what many regard as an impossible language to learn in a classroom as an adult. This perception ignores that indefinable Finnish characteristic known as sisu—an indefatigable sense of determination.
An Internet article actually bears the subtitle, “Who’s afraid of Finnish?” The answer, of course, is all adults of sound mind who did not learn Finnish in their childhood. My grandmother knew that. She spoke nothing but Finnish to her grandchildren in what I now know to be a not very successful attempt to force us to learn the language. I discovered many years after her death that she spoke perfect English, a language I thought she did not know at all, when I heard her speaking with a cousin’s fiancé.
But apart from learning the names of many kinds of food, a few swear words, and the simple declarative sentence, “I am going to bed” (“minä menen nukkumaan”), I remained devoid of linguistic ability in Finnish.
So, armed with a lesson book bearing the off-putting moniker, “Finnish for Foreigners,” I leapt into the fray in a beginning Finnish class. It was the most terrifying of textbooks—the second page of this tome lists 17 diphthongs, which one must memorize at the outset to know whether to pronounce two vowels as separate sounds or as one. What my mother taught me about Finnish—every letter is pronounced—turned out to be quite true. However, she never warned me about the similar sounding words distinguished only by a single letter. While “kuka” means “who,” adding another “k” to form the word “kukka” instead means “flower.” How about trying to pronounce “täytyy” (meaning “must”)?
The second rule on pronunciation is equally simple—the emphasis is always on the first syllable, a concept quite foreign to native English speakers when the first syllable contains a short vowel, such as “anteeksi,” meaning “sorry.” And how can an American mouth possibly emphasize the correct syllables when dealing with a word like “mannerheimintiella,” meaning “on the Mannerheim road”? This serves as a simple example of the Finnish habit of stringing words and case endings together to form a new word or phrase.
Worst of all are the sheer number of cases for nouns, some of which find no parallels in the English language. Finnish has fifteen cases for nouns, three of which are “inner” local cases, denoting prepositions such as in and into, and three “outer” local cases. Perhaps the most perplexing of cases is called the partitive, often used to refer to an indefinite quantity of things.
To be fair, some aspects of Finnish are easier than other languages. For example, nouns do not have a gender. So the Finnish word “hän” means both “he” and “she.” There are fewer letters in the Finnish alphabet than the English one. And Finnish uses many words borrowed from other languages. Who couldn’t recognize “banaani”and “kasetti?” Finally, the order of words in a sentence is not critical, unlike other languages, such as German.
Despite the near impossibility of learning our mother tongue, the most beautiful language in the world, an inexpressible pleasure results from being able to eke out a simple Finnish sentence and to understand one in return. But one thing is for certain—it takes a heap of sisu to learn Finnish!
Julie Badel is the current chairman of the Finlandia University Finnish Council in America. She lives in Chicago and is an attorney with Epstein, Becker, and Green and a member of the Finnish-American Chamber of Commerce-Midwest.
Reprinted with permission from the Fall/Winter 2010 issue of the Finlandia University (www.finlandia.edu) Bridge magazine
“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread” cautions the old adage. And so, a couple of years ago, I located a Finnish language class at a local university and began the struggle to learn what many regard as an impossible language to learn in a classroom as an adult. This perception ignores that indefinable Finnish characteristic known as sisu—an indefatigable sense of determination.
An Internet article actually bears the subtitle, “Who’s afraid of Finnish?” The answer, of course, is all adults of sound mind who did not learn Finnish in their childhood. My grandmother knew that. She spoke nothing but Finnish to her grandchildren in what I now know to be a not very successful attempt to force us to learn the language. I discovered many years after her death that she spoke perfect English, a language I thought she did not know at all, when I heard her speaking with a cousin’s fiancé.
But apart from learning the names of many kinds of food, a few swear words, and the simple declarative sentence, “I am going to bed” (“minä menen nukkumaan”), I remained devoid of linguistic ability in Finnish.
So, armed with a lesson book bearing the off-putting moniker, “Finnish for Foreigners,” I leapt into the fray in a beginning Finnish class. It was the most terrifying of textbooks—the second page of this tome lists 17 diphthongs, which one must memorize at the outset to know whether to pronounce two vowels as separate sounds or as one. What my mother taught me about Finnish—every letter is pronounced—turned out to be quite true. However, she never warned me about the similar sounding words distinguished only by a single letter. While “kuka” means “who,” adding another “k” to form the word “kukka” instead means “flower.” How about trying to pronounce “täytyy” (meaning “must”)?
The second rule on pronunciation is equally simple—the emphasis is always on the first syllable, a concept quite foreign to native English speakers when the first syllable contains a short vowel, such as “anteeksi,” meaning “sorry.” And how can an American mouth possibly emphasize the correct syllables when dealing with a word like “mannerheimintiella,” meaning “on the Mannerheim road”? This serves as a simple example of the Finnish habit of stringing words and case endings together to form a new word or phrase.
Worst of all are the sheer number of cases for nouns, some of which find no parallels in the English language. Finnish has fifteen cases for nouns, three of which are “inner” local cases, denoting prepositions such as in and into, and three “outer” local cases. Perhaps the most perplexing of cases is called the partitive, often used to refer to an indefinite quantity of things.
To be fair, some aspects of Finnish are easier than other languages. For example, nouns do not have a gender. So the Finnish word “hän” means both “he” and “she.” There are fewer letters in the Finnish alphabet than the English one. And Finnish uses many words borrowed from other languages. Who couldn’t recognize “banaani”and “kasetti?” Finally, the order of words in a sentence is not critical, unlike other languages, such as German.
Despite the near impossibility of learning our mother tongue, the most beautiful language in the world, an inexpressible pleasure results from being able to eke out a simple Finnish sentence and to understand one in return. But one thing is for certain—it takes a heap of sisu to learn Finnish!
Julie Badel is the current chairman of the Finlandia University Finnish Council in America. She lives in Chicago and is an attorney with Epstein, Becker, and Green and a member of the Finnish-American Chamber of Commerce-Midwest.
Reprinted with permission from the Fall/Winter 2010 issue of the Finlandia University (www.finlandia.edu) Bridge magazine
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