Now that I’ve finished my exams, I wanted to get back into studying languages.
There has always been 3 languages I’ve become really interested in developing a high level of fluency for.
Finnish, Japanese and Chinese.
I don’t care for having an “accent” in these languages, or that it can be identifed I’m from another country. I merely want to become fluent enough to have a fluent and deep conversation in the languages (C1 level in CEFR terms). However I also want to be able to read/write in these languages too.
I don’t have an interest in just speaking them, I want to understand them more, which means back to basics and learning the grammar and how sentences are constructed.
Finland is my #1 language that I want to learn. I’ve expressed my interests in the country, the culture, the people and their way of life. I feel I have a sense of belonging there and it’s my home from home. To the point where if I uprooted, I would want to live there.
I want to be able to speak without problems like a native, and wanted to share my language learning journey. Finnish is one of the hardest languages to learn, and it’s considered to take around 1100 hours to learn it (that’s 3 hours per day, every day for a year)
I’ve been recording my language progress in a spreadsheet to see how long I’ve studied for in terms of my progress.
We all learn at our own pace. For myself, I find teaching myself is how I learn, so I’ve got to find a method that works for me
Difficulties faced speaking Finnish – As a Native English speaker, seeing the long words is confusing
To overcome this, I want to read some dictionaries and start learning words. It’s easy for Finnish people, because they appear to be reading one word at a time, as they understand where each word starts and finishes, I think this makes it easier for them.
Also I’ve found that studying the words and reading them out slowly inside your head helps you understand the structure and how to speak it a lot more.
Onto the video of me speaking Finnish
Current studying time : 4 hours.
Here is my 1st attempt at speaking more than few words in Finnish language, and also me attempting the longest word in the Finnish dictionary. I don’t care for editing videos, all videos I post are generally raw, I suck at video editing, and my aim is to improve my speaking ability, not improve how the video looks. I tend to do videos on the fly, so was tired, and don’t particularly enjoy being on camera as you can tell in the video.
