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.
After I posted two new recipes to the site a few weeks ago, I noticed that they were very appreciated. That got me thinking that it might be nice to solicite recipes from our online community to help build out our recipe section. Also, to add a place on our site for people to request particular recipes. So, I set about this task this week to see it through — oh the joys of being able to manage the website simply and independently from my phone or computer!
So, what would you like to see added to the Luumu recipe section, even if you don't have a recipe for it yourself yet? Or do you have a recipe to share?
I started a Keskustelutunti group in late Spring 2021 because I had noticed that in my previous encounters with language conversation groups, the topics of conversation were always nearly identical and thus I got frustrated as a participant because I felt like I was never making much progress. When I was developing the idea for Keskustelutunti, I remembered how my Suomi-Klubi teachers (University students studying Finnish as a Second Language) approached our weekly meetings. They always made sure to make it fun and also ensure that there was plenty of time for participants to talk, while ensuring that we had a new focus each time.
We usually kept our meetings light on grammar, with more emphasis on communication and just trying to say what we wanted to say. We would learn through listening to songs and discussing the culture through the lyrics, share about a specific topic in our lives, etc. The leader would share a few words and notes on the white board, but nothing overwhelming – just enough information.
