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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

I think this idea is super cool and I have no qualms with my tax money going to stuff like this- it's incredibly welcoming and needed in one of the most uncertain and harshest times in an adult life.

What's interesting to me is that half the book is Swedish and the other half Finnish, I had no idea that Finnish people learned Swedish so early- yet their English proficiency is so much higher.

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Swedish is an official language in Finland and the native language of about 5% or so of all Finnish people (think like French in Canada). Especially Åland Islands is heavily Swedish speaking.

Eh, kind of, Canada is 20% native French; there are more French Canadians than Finnish people.

Actually, if you look at Finland and Sweden as a whole, with Sweden having twice as many people, it's more like Finnish is French, and Swedish English.

In this analogy, the Swedish speaking finns are more like anglos living in Quebec.

Finns don't really learn swedish, unless one lives in an area with a large swedish speaking population. In total swedish speaking population is only a few percent, but there are areas with a higher concentration. The reason it's bilingual is because swedish is the second official language in finland. Because history (sweden ruled finland up to 19th century, swedish speaking population retained considerable political power even after that).

>Finns don't really learn swedish

Which is funny, considering how many years (6 I guess?) the Swedish language is a compulsory subject for Finnish-speaking Finns.

Just goes to show you can't learn a language unless you use it in real-life.

To retain a language it requires active usage. Swedish has zero utility outside school environment unless someones life is such it includes interaction in swedish. Most people I know are more fluent in english than in swedish. While I personally retain some rudimentary basics, when I need to talk to my swedish colleague, I use english.

To get MSc one must theoretically prove to be able to communicate in swedish but the minimum acceptable level - how to put it - is not very high.

Since the sibling comments already explained the Finland-Swedes, I'll just add a bit of trivia relevant to this crowd: Linus Torvalds is one of them. His first language was Swedish, and apparently he's never spoken Finnish particularly well.

He speaks Finnish fluently, I've videos of his lectures about Linux from the 90s at Helsinki University. Had I not known who he was, I would have not guessed he was of the Swedish-speaking minority (either that or I wasn't paying attention, I saw them ten years ago). You can find some videos on YouTube, no doubt.

Interesting! I'd read an interview where he claimed his proficiency was noticeably non-native[0], but maybe he was just being self-effacing.

[0] http://www.linuxveda.com/2011/11/02/which-is-linus-torvalds-...

Linus has excellent proficiency in Finnish; his intonation is distinctly that of a Swedish-speaking native but that is just a matter of style.

But then there are Finnish rock stars who lived a year in Stockholm and then pretended they've forgotten all about Finnish language. (Andy McCoy of Hanoi Rocks, I mean).

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