The Lord has blessed me to live in Finland for almost three years. I have made lots of friends here and met interesting people in my daily life. Nevertheless, like any other foreigner in Finland, I am no exception and I also struggle to learn Finnish. (Oh, I thought it was enough to learn svenska - Swedish!)
Having already taken Finnish Level One, this year I started with the jatkokurssi - continuation course. But, strangely enough, I do not feel the course is as challenging: many of the words I knew already and I also didn't find it that difficult to conjugate cases. What happened?! It's as if I had taken some extra courses already!
Until yesterday, I did not know where I had learned the words I knew. But guess what?! A huge percentage of my Finnish vocabulary I have acquired in the Church! We were learning positioning words and furniture, for example oikealla puolella (which I read every Sunday in Creed: at the right [hand of the Father]). There are many more words, such as koska, siksi, jos, leipä, taivas, koti that I realized I had learned by reading the day's Gospel in Spanish while I was listening to it in Finnish, or through repeating prayers or songs. |