Studying the Finnish language

Hello,

we are Hungarian exchange students from Veszprém which is one of the partnership towns of Rovaniemi. We started to study Finnish in January, 2012 at RAMK. Before we started to learn it, our first impression was conflicting, because we thought that this language is fast and it has many long words. Later we discovered that it is not as hard as we thought. For Hungarians, especially for us, studying Finnish was exciting, interesting and a good challenge.

We realized that it is not so difficult to understand Finnish grammar because we have the common language origin. For us, it is interesting to discover the similarities and the differencies between these two languages.

The pronounciation is the other surprising thing which have occured during the lessons. We noticed that the other students from Europe and Asia have difficulties with pronounciation and long words. The vowels with dots (ä, ö, y <ü>) and the linked vowels (äi, ei, öy, öi, etc…) make them confused, they hardly can pronounce them, they need a lot of practice. For us it is easier, because in Hungarian we have the same vowels and letters.

Our recommendations to study Finnish easier: practice the pronounciation of the unknown letters, try to memorize long words, be patient when studying the grammar. Write, speak and listen a lot. It is easier to memorize a word when you related it to an English word.

For us this is a good experience to live in Finnish environment not only to improve our language skills, but study the common characteristics of Finnish and Hungarian language.

Orsi & Zsófi