So you are in this foreign country now. And you have been learning a new language for some time.
One day, in the streets, you pass some street sign and, woah, you could understand (some of) it!
After some time, it becomes quite common – that you look at some written words and you totally understand what they mean. Piece of cake, so easy. So easy that you don’t even notice it anymore.
On another particular day, you pass a sign and you understand it, as usual. But THEN, you realize that that sign was NOT in the language you were learning. You were not supposed to understand this one. Oh no!
This was the big question about learning a language in Finland. The main language is, of course, Finnish. But then Finland has a Swedish-speaking minority and the university that I was going to was the Swedish-Speaking University of Finland. So which one to learn? Swedish or Finnish? (Well, the answer to that was: Both!). Or rather, which one to learn first? Finnish or Swedish?
Back when I was coming to Finland, I had already started doing Finnish vocabulary, but once here, I decided to opt for Swedish. Swedish was easier to learn (so said the internet) and I could see an end point for it. Not to mention, the people in my more immediate surroundings were Swedish-speakers.
So this is how the equation set in my mind at that time: If I would start Finnish and it would take me two years, I might still not be good enough, making it unfavorable to start Swedish. But if I start Swedish, which was easier to do, there was a bigger possibility that I might reach a stage where I could then jump to Finnish, and spend rest of my time in Finland learning as much as I could of it.
So I started to block out the Finnish and focus on the Swedish, but then I would pick up some written Finnish along with the Swedish and not realize until afterwards which language was it that I was reading. No, no, no, that was not how we planned it. Finnish was not what we were supposed to be able to read. (And strangely, I would then try to come up for the Swedish counterpart of the Finnish I just came by, and it wouldn’t come to me).
This year, regardless of whether I was at a good place in my Swedish, I decided to start Finnish. And I have never been as much afraid of sitting in a class in my whole life!
My fear was not unfounded. When we were supposed to come up with the Finnish for Saturday, my mind would scream “lördag!” (Saturday in Swedish), and seeing the number 4, it would be all “fyra, fyra, fyra, FYRA!” in my head. I don’t know if that is a good or bad sign, but I have so far been successful in not replying in Swedish to any of the questions.
But learning Finnish has also motivated me to ramp up my Swedish learning curve, because once I am surer of my Swedish, I wouldn’t mix it up with my Finnish. And while I knew objectively that they were two totally different languages before this, I now really know how totally different they are from each other (and how they sound so crazy sometimes when you look at them from each others’ perspectives: You are not supposed to change the sentence structure when forming questions in Finnish? Why would you do that?! How in the world can you have front and back vowels in the same words in Swedish? That doesn’t make sense!).
But we try and prevent all sorts of brain-scrambles. And I haven’t even started comparing Finnish to my other three languages.