I’ve been living in Helsinki since November 2018, and like many people I met back then told me, “You moved to Finland at the worst time of the year.” Well, they weren’t wrong. Coming from a southern background, it wasn’t easy to adapt to the dark and cold.

But when it came to learning the language of this cold cold land, I did have one advantage!

Learn by Talking without Saying too Much

When I decided to learn the language I asked 2 of my Turkish friends to join me for an online course once a week for an hour. We knew that it wasn’t gonna be enough but we gotta start from somewhere. And we did!

Roosa Kuusisto was our beloved teacher. Her method was not something we used to but it worked. We didn’t start learning grammar at first. We had different topics every week, that helped us build vocabulary. We were reading the words and sentences out loud. Slowly slowly we started asking “How can I say ‘I like dancing’ or ‘I don’t like winter’?” . Then we started learning structures. The more spice we wanted the more vocabulary and structure we learned.

Using Finnish Outside of Classroom

We took the lessons over a year without doing much outside of the class (not proud of it). Personally, all I did was sharing what I learned with my friends, repeating some sentences with them. For example when I go to social dancing I was saying “Haluatko tanssia?” or “uudellen?”. I was also using Duolingo (current streak is 581 days 😎). It only helped learning new words, nothing much. The difficult thing of practise Finnish in life is the pace the locals speak and murre a.k.a dialects. So one really needs to pay attention to understand.

Getting Prepared for YKI Test

When I decided to take YKI test (National Certificate of Language Proficiency) I have changed the way I study and practice. Everyday I was watching selkouutiset (news in easy Finnish), listening to podcasts and following a holly book called Ykäänkö vai Ykiinkö. As everyone on the journey I also finished books called Suomen mestari 1-2 by myself. When I was doing some chores I was watching Finnish series (for example Aikuiset) and listening Finnish artists (for example Anna Puu, Scandinavian Music Group).

My Advantage Was My Mother Language

The reason I was able to study on my own is that my mother tongue, Turkish, is actually quite similar to Finnish in structure! Yes, it really is!

For example both languages are agglutinative (cool word!), meaning they build words by adding suffixes to a root word to express grammatical relationships.

  • Turkish: ev → evler (houses) → evlerde (in the houses) → evlerdendir (he/she is from the houses)
  • Finnish: talo → talot (houses) → taloissa (in the houses) → taloistanne (from your houses)

Neither language uses articles (“a”, “the”) or grammatical gender, simplifying sentence structure.

  • Turkish: “Ben öğretmenim.” (I am a teacher.)
  • Finnish: “Minä olen opettaja.” (I am a teacher.)

Both languages use vowel harmony, where vowels within a word harmonize to be front or back vowels.

  • Turkish: ev (house) → evler (houses), okul (school) → okullar (schools)
  • Finnish: talo (house) → talossa (in the house), työ (work) → työssä (at work)

When I figured out these similarities I got to study faster and more efficient. It took me 3 months of structured study and I passed all the sections in the first try. Can I write this post in Finnish? Well, maybe not with exact same way, but I can definitely give you the message! 😎