October 12, 2011

I’m not so pumped about my Finnish class.

No, it’s not why you think — it’s not because it’s too hard. Yet. (Though, I expect, I can begin blogging about that next week.)

My issue is that my Finnish class has about sixty people in it. This would normally be fine, except the class is supposed to be for beginners without any knowledge of the language.

What I would like to know, then, is why there only seem to be about five of us who can’t actually speak the language. You know, having a vocabulary of about 75-100 words as I do, I thought I was doing damn well.

Ha!

I mean, the teacher is teaching introductory stuff, which is awesome. What is not awesome is how discouraging it is that I didn’t know the days of the week when the chick sitting next to me knows what the Finnish word for “rock” is. Last time I checked, in an introductory class, it would be normal to know how to say hello and ask how someone is doing; not know words for things like “rock” or the verb “to kill”. (Yeah, WTF about that.)

I think I was studying German for a couple semesters before I came across vocab like that.
So, it’s discouraging. And, I finally had a breakthrough on Monday night. My first Finnish breakthrough! The crappy thing is, since I’m so far behind (as if that’s even possible in a beginners’ class), I don’t even feel like I can celebrate it.

Thus, I am blog-celebrating it with you, because you can just skip over this post and not actually read it. And I will be none the wiser!

As a bit of background, E. and her family run around saying two things all the time for “no”: “en” and “ei”.

Seeing as I didn’t understand anything, I never really got the hang of when someone said one and not the other. Until Monday evening, that is.

You see, in class on Monday, the teacher went was just touching base on some of the difficult things for non-native speakers of Finnish. One of the things she discussed is the Verneinungsformen (no idea what this is in English off-hand, and I’m way too lazy to translate it for you). Basically, in English, German, French, whatever, when we say no, it’s just no. However, those pesky Finns have different ways of negating something based on the personal pronoun.

Aha.

So, on Monday evening I was having a Finnish conversation which included being asked if I am speaking Finnish.

The response?

EN, because that’s the negation form for first-person singular.

BOOYAH!!!!
Breakthrough.

**********
Oh, and I also learned the very important difference between “minä tapan” and “minä tapaan”.
Hmph.