As tempted as I am...

[mmailliw]

to write a long rant talking about how my Finnish studies (doing a lot of shit - people THINK I'm doing well... and I'm acing the grammar exercises except that listening stuff is really hard - in real life people don't understand me in Finnish OR in English quite a bit of the time - and I know I will NEVER come close to passing as anything other

Comments

[clytemnestra215]

Finnish is a super hard language though. I'm not sure I'd attempt it myself.

[mmailliw]

Ahh, but I do have a secret advantage: traditionally, mathematicians do REALLY well when trying to learn it because the grammatical structure is very logical (if different from every other language) - and my year of experience DOES seem to bear this out!

[clytemnestra215]

Yeah, logical grammatical structures help. :)

[mmailliw]

Right eye color, yes... but wrong face

and even if I were somehow able to succeed at that, my cluelessness - i.e. not knowing what BUILDING is the right one due to piss-poor labeling would give me away so fucking fast

[bodha]

Maybe your Finnish class is too theoretical? So you get all the grammar and learn nice long vocab lists but it doesn't prepare you for the Native Speakers out there. Also you are definitely expecting too much from yourself if you think you could already pass for a Native. I'm pretty sure I never trick any Native Speaker of English and I have been learning/speaking English for 19 years (oh god I am old). I know my uncle said that it's kinda hard to find friends in Finland (way back when he cruised the ocean around there), so maybe that is also hampering your language improvement.

Is the weather improving at least? We are already close to breaking out of the winter cold here in Vienna (tendency of 10+ degrees Celsius), but I suppose Helsinki is not as kind.

[mmailliw]

The weather HAS been improving lately; in fact, it's been almost spring since Feb 20 or so by Finnish standards