My second winter as a student in Oulu, I spent the entire Christmas break with my adopted friendship family, the Hannus family. When they picked me up from my student apartment complex near the university, I was ready to go. It had mostly cleared out for the break time with students scattering around the world, until studies resumed again in January.
Merry Christmas! Well, Christmas Eve at least! I am baking pulla with Nastya. Basically no one is here in Lapinkaari. That is ok. It makes using the kitchen much easier and I can sing in my room. On Thursday, I went out to the Turtola shopping area. Not as big as Lielahti, but still nice. I bought some ribbon that wasn’t on sale and then got some just like it at Tiimari in Tulintori for 70% off. Well, lets just say I’ll have enough “Hyvää joulua” ribbon for a while.
I miss many things about the start of the school year in Finland. So many things. I have had the pleasure of experiencing three back-to-school seasons in Finland. One in Tampere and two in Oulu. As you may have gathered from previous blog posts, I have really enjoyed getting to live in Finland and study there. In this post, I share 5 of the things I miss the most about back-to-school season in Tampere and Oulu.
Becoming fluent in Finnish is admittedly challenging. It can take years of dedication and perseverence — aka, sisu! That being said, I don’t believe that people are either good at language learning or not. I think that when a skill is taken seriously and time is spent on it, it is possible to master almost anything. I have had many friends who have been frustrated that they feel like they know and understand quite a lot of Finnish and maybe have attended several beginning or even intermediate group classes, but still haven’t advanced their Finnish language skills significantly past the intermediate stage. As a life-long learner and teacher of Finnish myself, who did not grow up in a Finnish-speaking family, I can share with you what I did to help my fluency significantly, while I was at that most frustrating stage between beginner and highly proficient. There is nothing easy about these methods, but as they say things that are easy aren’t always the most worthy endeavors anyway.
