How to Fail at Being Finnish: Diary #1
Back to school
Welcome to the first entry in a new series documenting my ongoing adventures as a recovering line cook. This series will be a little diaristic, a little less edited, and full of the things that have coloured my life each week as a Brit making a life and home in Finland.
I hope you like them.
These will be free to read. If you like them, you can always help by sharing or becoming a paid subscriber (paid subs get access to all my essays and food writing, I promise it’s worth it)
Wil
#1
Now he is approaching seven, my son is comfortably eloquent and worldly enough to pass brutal judgement on the quality of my Finnish language skills.
“Daddy sounds weird”, he implores.
“Speak English,” he demands.
“Make it stop,” he says, running to his mother in tears.
He is, unfortunately, not wrong, and it’s for this reason I’ve decided, 4 years on from my last attempt, to start taking lessons again.
Much to my surprise, I passed the entrance tests to join a full time, intensive course here in Turku. Now that the start date has arrived, however, I find that my early excitement has morphed into something less positive...
As I said, I’ve done a Finnish language course before. I know from experience that, as joyous as being able to speak another language is, even as badly as I do Finnish, learning that language is nowhere near as pleasant.
It’s miserable.
Profoundly miserable.
Yes, I understand that some people enjoy this struggle. I also understand some people enjoy having their nipples clamped, and listening to Ed Sheeran.
I rarely enjoy either of these things.
Whenever I remember that last course 4 years ago, I only think of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
To misquote from that novel, if you want a picture of what language learning feels like to me, imagine a boot stamping on a human face–forever.
MONDAY
Day 1 immediately offers a source of pain that even I wasn’t expecting.
Before I get to that, I need to say that my new school has clearly been designed by an enthusiast of ancient Greek labyrinths. The place makes no sense. To reach my classroom on the fourth floor, I am first required to enter the building on the second floor, then to walk down one staircase to the basement, answer riddles three and complete a sequence of skipping exercises, and only then to find a different staircase that has access to the part of the fourth floor where my classroom can be found.
By the time I complete this maze and start looking for a toilet ahead of my first 3-hour class, my patience is cigarette paper thin. This impatience overpowers my natural reticence and I knock on a classroom and ask the teacher inside, in Finnish so as not to draw attention to myself, if there is a toilet around here. The only words I immediately understand are vasemmalle (on the left) and portaat (staircase).
Now increasingly late for my class and far sweatier than I’d planned, I find the next vasemmalle portaat and quickly enter the only toilet to be found there.
What happens next does so, I hope, in no more than 1.5 seconds, though it feels like much longer. In the corner of my vision I see a huddle of beings grouped at the toilet mirror. One of them seems to be sitting on the counter. Knowing this is not a typically male thing to do, I gauge pretty quickly how much I’ve fucked up here. Any hope I’d go unnoticed evaporates with the immediate silencing of their conversation. If that was the first .5 seconds, then the screams that followed took up the following 1 second.
Anteeks, I implore, anteeks, anteeks (sorry). I keep my eyes on the floor as I back away, grateful that my Finnish isn’t good enough to understand whatever insults and expletives they are throwing my way.
Nor have I ever felt so old here. Though my class is full of people about my age or older, the school itself appears to be some kind of high school. Most of the students loudly moving along the corridors can’t be any older than 18. I must look ancient to them, riding up to the front of my school on the cargo bike I took my kids to daycare in that morning.
I stay in the classroom for lunch because I absolutely have no interest, age 39, in dealing with eating alone and looking like I have no friends, which, of course, I don’t. But, just as my classmates return, a group of teenage boys runs into our classroom as well, blocking the door behind them.
Panic engulfs me immediately. This isn’t a hazing, is it? We’re not about to be hazed by the local kids are we?
Then the panic consolidates further. Maybe it’s only me they’re after. Maybe the girls I walked in on earlier have sent their men after me and I’m about to be publicly humiliated for a TikTok video and branded whatever the Finnish for “crispy old pervert” is.
I should have known my life would lead to this.
Then one of my classmates, a Belarusian woman who I don’t know the name of yet, goes up to them, yells “mene ulos” (get out) and gestures with a firm jut of her head for them to go through the door. She locks the door behind them.
Yes, teenagers scare the shit out of me, but nothing like that Belarusian does.
TUESDAY
Today we are introduced to our English teacher. Since the Finnish language course I’m on is all about professional development, it also includes a few hours a week helping develop English skills. Luckily the teacher seems willing to let me skip it. To judge this, however, she asks me outside for a quick chat before class begins. It’s an odd sensation, being invited for a chat in the knowledge that your answers are going to be judged for the quality of your native tongue. Obviously, I trip up on the first words that come out of my mouth and can’t quite remember the word for when you are happy and content in a situation, you know, the opposite of something like uncomfortable. Comfortable. That’s the word. “Comfortable”.
Despite this, she cuts me off mid sentence and promises to pass me with an “excellent” grade and that I needn’t bother joining the course.
Is it pathetic that I took some pride in this?
WEDNESDAY
Last night’s homework consisted of recording a message for my teacher. It could be about anything, the message, as long as I used a particular type of grammatical conjugation in it. Because I’m trying not to get too much help from my (Finnish) wife, I’m pretty sure I told him that I write a food newsletter that has eaten 4.5 million readers.
My wife, as I did this, was scrolling through Instagram. She shared a meme that says if you are older than 39, you’re older than the actor who played Old Man Marley in the original Home Alone at the time he filmed it. Surely not, we both reassured each other, agreeing we’d need to research this further to see if it was just a prank.
But, let’s be honest, if you need to Google whether you’re older than the guy who played Old Man Marley in Home Alone, then you might as well be.
I took lunch outside in an attempt to clear my mind of verb conjugations and this happened…
Day made.
THURSDAY
I’ve stayed away from the toilets since Monday; I’m not giving any of these Gen Z vigilantes any excuses. On passing said toilet, however, I do now believe the same person who designed the inexplicable layout of this place might be responsible for the similarly user-unfriendly design of the toilet gender pictogram. Let me know if you agree in the comments. If you were in a hurry, would you know at a glance?
FRIDAY
In a sense, the class is as bad as I feared. Having to speak Finnish at strangers using conjugations and words I barely understand is a unique type of pain. And the effort, even a few hours at a time, is physically exhausting. I’m also working hard not to be embarrassingly jealous of how everyone has already coalesced into friendship groups corresponding to broad global region of home country. There is a Baltic group, a South East Asian group, a Slavic one. I, the sole Brit, clearly remain the sick man of Finnish language learning.
My Finnish teacher is a pleasant, middle aged man with no hair and an enormous smile. Think a slightly less hairy but friendlier Willem Dafoe or a better looking version of The Gentlemen from Buffy. Toothy. And he is a lot of fun, is clearly enthusiastic, and yet… the guy never laughs at my jokes. It’s for this reason I am convinced he hates me. By the end of the first week I think I’ve found this has actually inspired me to work harder on my homework and concentrate more in class.
The teacher concludes our Friday class with a question. He asks us how we have found the first week. I’m encouraged by the fact that everyone agrees it’s hard, even though I remain certain I found it harder than the rest. In reply to this, he asks us another question. I’ll share in English...
“What is important to you in life?” He waits for answers. Things like family, work, friends and money are all shouted out.
Then he asks: “Are any of those things easy?”
We agree they aren’t.
“Finnish learning is the same,” he says. “Important, not easy.”
I like that.
As long as I can stay away from the girls toilets, I think I’ll like this course, too.
I’m about to head home. Family and sauna and an evening of not doing homework awaits when I pass the toilets again.
I KID YOU NOT, a new gender pictogram has been added.
This can’t be a coincidence.
Maybe I wasn’t the only one to have got confused this week…
Thanks for reading.
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Bless. But, tit whisperer.