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As far as language goes, my advice for learning a new one would be the exact opposite of what you say. Force yourself to use the language all the time, everywhere. Otherwise people will just default to English with you, and you'll have a hard time learning the local language.

It'll be very stressful for a few months, but, in my experience, will get you conversing in about half a year.

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As someone who has lived in this environment for this long, it doesn't work that way.

This is not a language that shares any traits with English. It is hard to get going, and the vocabulary takes a considerable amount of time.

You can't switch to Finnish at work, as you simply would not be able to get by, and you can't do it at home as it changes the dynamics of your relationship. This is not an excuse, it's reality.

I don’t buy that. Japanese is completely different, too, but I learned most of it while in Japan where I was forced to speak it.

Finish kids don’t need ten years to learn the language either, do they?

If anything Finnish is much easier than Japanese for Europeans.

Only if you're from Estonia or Hungary. Finnish is so different from all the other European languages that it's like starting from zero. The letter system aside I've found Japanese much easier to learn and I'm half-Finnish (Swedish being my native language).

Finnish is notorious for its complex grammar. I'm half-Finnish and still cannot hold a real conversation even though I took classes for years when young. For Japanese one semester was enough to be able to hold a basic conversation when visiting Tokyo.

I also learned Japanese to a professional level very rapidly by immersion (and focused study in parallel), but I was single and not working at the time, which was critical. If you have a full-time job (that you need to perform in your native language), you lose 50% of your immersion potential; if you have a (non-local) family, you likely lose the other 50%; now you are just spending scraps of time studying.

So I think in this context of a professional—who likely has a family—coming over to work, deanclatworthy is right.

It isn't the same thing, if you try to speak poor Finnish in Finland they just switch to English since most people speak English. In Japan most people don't even understand basic spoken English so getting them to speak Japanese with you is really easy.

Finnish kids have finnish-speaking parents, and spend their entire days immersed in the language, at home, daycare, or school.

Expats are most likely are in an English-speaking environment at work, where speaking Finnish at the level of a four-year-old is going to be a bit of a hindrance; no practice at home unless they have a Finnish partner, and no real options for social activities that will tolerate the learning curve, like children have.

And if it is anything like the Netherlands, any mistake you make will instantly and irreversibly switch the conversation back to English.

I moved to Finland, and then had a child. He's now nearing four years old and he's very bilingual - to the extent that he translates for me at times.

Children learn the local language, partly because of immersion, but also because they're corrected nearly constantly when they begin to speak. We forget that when they're capable of "good" communication.

I'm seeing interesting things here, I speak to the child exclusively in English and as far as he's concerned I speak/understand zero Finnish. I'm hoping I can start speaking more Finnish in the near future, he should be able to understand I'm "mostly English".

One obvious thing that really drives the language home is the notion of pronouns. Finnish has no gendered ones, so when he speaks English to me he'll be "Mummy is asleep, he will wake up soon?". I have to keep saying "Mummy is a girl, we say she". I've been doing that for 8+ months, and he still doesn't get it right. That's the level of repetition that's involved in learning a new language.. and even now it hasn't "stuck".

I'm a native Finnish speaker near Helsinki. The problems you mention are definitely very common for skilled immigrants here - if you don't absolutely need to learn the language, you're not very likely to put yourself through the hardship it entails. Especially if you've already formed social bonds in English.

That's what I was trying to say. If you do want to learn the local language, you have to be willing and able to put up with it being pretty crappy for a few months. My experience has been that it's very hard to integrate a new language into your persona without immersing yourself in it. For most people it's not worth it if they can get by without. Completely understandable.

Now you've got me wondering if I should start thinking about how to teach Finnish to English-speaking professionals :D

You just need to memorize about 1000 words to be conversational in almost any language. It's not difficult.

Learning Finnish takes time, dedication, and willingness to do it on one's own f you want to master it. I belong to the Swedish-speaking minority here, and there's plenty of people in the Swedish-speaking areas that know little to no Finnish, despite learning it in school and living in Finland.

If you want to learn Finnish, go for it. Just don't expect it to be easy. :)

Finnish belongs to a language group[1] that consists of just two other languages (Estonian and Hungarian). It's quite literally like nothing else.

Living in a neighboring country I understand nothing of Finnish. Spanish, Italian, French — I can make some sense out of it without knowing the languages.

I must however add that I've witnessed, more than a handful of times, English speaking knowledge workers moving to Sweden who continue speaking English and only English for years and years.

It comes with a social price though. You will never quite understand all the social codes or become a part of the social fabric. At many parties and dinners I've seen the whole group having to switch to English because there's someone in the group who has lived here for five or ten years and still haven't gotten around even attempting to speak Swedish. Everyone will switch but but it will be a different night, without all the nuances we usually enjoy. In the end everyone loses.

If you plan to stay, do everything to learn the language. You will be happier person in your new country.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_languages

That is slightly incorrect. There are a bunch of languages in the Russian Federation/Scandinavian Peninsula that are very close to Finnish. Much closer than Hungarian itself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Permic_languages#/media/...

You do not have to force yourself to use the language. It's a stressful, uncomfortable and not particularly efficient way of studying a language, especially for introverts. Some polyglots study this way, some do not - it's absolutely not a necessity. Some polyglots go by the motto: "if you can understand the spoken language, and you're able to write in it, then you're able to speak in it, too".

There is no shortcut to learning a new language - even if you're fluent in 9 languages, the 10th will still take 1000+ hours. The most efficient way appears to be a loop of listening and drilling vocabulary, particularly listening to excerpts that come with text transcription.

As an avid language learner, I can confirm this.

I always make most progress when I’m forced to use the language when I’m in the country.

I’m surprised OP isn’t fluent with the language after 10 years in the country.

As an avid language learner myself, I would be inclined to agree, were it not for the fact that about half of my father's siblings really have no aptitude _at all_ for languages.

One uncle has been living in France for over 40 years, but anyone can still hear he’s a foreigner, most Dutch will immediately recognize his accent as Dutch, and many can immediately pinpoint the region he grew up in. (Part of the reason is probably: he himself doesn’t care. He just talks —sometimes with hands and feet— and his interlocutors manage to pick up enough of what he says to suit him.)

An aunt used to live in Brazil for years, and never could get the hang of Brazilian Portuguese. Her son has been living in Brazil for some 15 year now, and is still not fluent in the language...

People's ability to pick up languages can be totally unrelated to their general intelligence.

That said, I _personally_ agree that immersion is the best way of learning a new language. But it still does take time, and you've got to have the opportunity.

Learn the modal verbs. Learn infinitives (verbs) Learn tenses. Learn vocab

Yes that, Exactly!

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