002: How I Achieved Fluency in Finnish in Just One Year

basically I had to pretend I don't speak English for a year and then try to live in Finland without speaking English in order for this to happen. So starting from January 1st. 2022 Hi guys, welcome back to How I Learned Finnish with Ohe, and as usual, I'm your host, Oheneba Poku-Marboah, also known as Ohe. Today I'm going to give you a monologue of my story of how I was able to learn Finnish in 2022, when I set the entire year, and just with that one goal of learning Finnish to a high level of fluency. And it might turn out to be a long episode, but let's see how that goes. I'm gonna take you through a few key elements of my story. What was my target in 2022, what I did and what thinking you should or should not have when you went to achieve the goal of learning the Finnish language, or really any other language.

So on my story, so I've been here for a while. In 2021, I got my first job and I realized that it's starting to affect my pocket. And let me quickly elaborate what I meant by it was starting to affect my pocket. I already knew some Finnish before I started this journey of becoming very fluent.

But it started affecting my pocket because I could see all the people in higher positions in my company spoke Finnish So for me, it was a matter of becoming the kind of person who could reach that level in the company. And like a lot of these career things They happen based on who you know or who has observed you do something good. And I realized I couldn't really get close to the higher ups in my company because of the language barrier. So it started eating at my brain a little bit. A little bit. And there was this very funny thing that was kept happening. Our chief financial officer, CFO, I would notice her walk past my desk, she would look at me kind of like smiling, like you are about to say something. But then she wouldn't and I, and my delusion was like, she probably wants to have a conversation, but the fact that she has the language barrier, 'cause I had the language barrier in speak and Finnish. So I would imagine that somebody else would also have it vice in the other way around speaking English with me. And I would always catch her stopping herself whenever she was trying to have a -. She was about to start a conversation with me or maybe make a comment and I felt myself missing out on connections with some of these people who would be very beneficial in my career. That and a whole load of other things, how I was having friction in my life, in my living in Finland, really just forced me to want to learn the language.

So my target, what was the goal? The goal was to have minimal or no friction mentally so that I am fully comfortable speaking. And to train the reflex of speaking in that language. So basically I want to take a block of time and when I enter one end of that block of time, my skill level is low. And when I come out of the block of time on the other end, my skill level is very high. That was basically it. I was gonna pick that one year, 2022 to be that block of time. I would just go as hard as I can in that period. And then hopefully 2023 was gonna be a better year. But I could tell you that already in 2022, by summer, I was already moving in a way that I was like, wow, this was really worth it. 'cause I even ended up getting a job simply because of how well I spoke Finnish. Yeah. Essentially with language speaking, if I have to talk about, if I have to think before I talk, it's not really enjoyable anymore. I can do operational, functional things, things that I need to do in the language, but then it's not, I can't have fun conversations anymore. So it was like, okay, there are six parts to learning a language. And I want to train all of those so that when I come out of 2022, everything of all of those work on the reflex level. So it's 1. vocabulary 2. speaking 3. listening, 4. grammar, 5. reading, and 6. writing. So how was I gonna go about this?

The people I know who have been able to learn Finnish with super high level of fluency, most of them come from non-English speaking countries, which means that when they arrived in Finland, they could not communicate with anyone without learning the Finnish language. People from Russia, Congo, Angola, 'cause they're not anglophone countries.

How can I, my, my goal is basically to simulate the condition in my life for that year that they experience when they come here, in which they are basically they basically have no choice than to speak Finnish. So basically I had to pretend I don't speak English for a year and then try to live in Finland without speaking English in order for this to happen. So starting from January 1st. 2022. I went crazy. I went crazy. I posted on all of my social media, LinkedIn Instagram, uh, I think on WhatsApp as well, if the WhatsApp stories existed. I posted this in Finnish because obviously, I'm trying to learn Finnish, so I posted it in target language, but this is the translation of what I wrote on my LinkedIn post. For many reasons, I decided that my New Year's resolution is to speak Finnish whenever possible, because I want to participate in small talk and tell jokes naturally as I do in English bracket, I'm quite often hilarious in English. Stop. So if you speak Finnish, our interactions will be in Finnish until the end of 2022. The exception is situations where I'm too tired to think. I rarely share my goals until they're completed or achieved. This goal requires that I tell everyone I'm dealing with. I would appreciate it if you could correct my language. Mistakes in bracket, even though it becomes difficult if I'm in a bad mood close bracket, so that the correction of my Finnish is not solely on my girlfriend's shoulders. That was the post that I kickstarted that year with I think January 1st, or maybe December 31st of the previous year, 2021. I posted this on all of my socials. It was very uncomfortable. 'Cause I like, I don't share my, I don't tell people I'm gonna do X before I go and do X. So that was a little awkward, but I felt like it was required. So yeah, that was the post that I made to kickstart the year. Meaning I was all about it.

Then one thing that I did on a daily was podcasts. So I have my own interests already. I am interested in sports, I was very interested in investing at that time, investing in real estate. And I'd also just investing in, uh, just stock market stuff. So there was a bunch of podcasts in Finnish that I was just consuming. And then also just for entertainment. Kulttuuri Ykkönen was, I really missed that podcast actually. I just kind of stopped listening to it. They talk about movies, books, TVs, things that are going on in popular culture. Julia Thuren's Melkein kaikki rahasta, the Mimmit Sijoittaa podcast, politiikka Radio. That was, that was a very good one because we got politicians talking. And they talk or they speak with grammatically almost correct Finnish. So it's very different from the slang you would hear on the streets or how people just talk because they need to be able to reach a wide audience. And that was very useful for my Finnish, uh, this Nordnet's Rahapodi, Inderes, Yle uutiset selkosuomeksi Kaverin Puolesta Kyselen. That was a lot of fun. The National Broadcaster of Finland. Their radio service has actually a very good selection. 'cause a lot of these are from, a lot of these are from them. Yeah. I need to do a whole podcast episode on just the podcasts that I listened to while I was trying to learn Finnish, because that was a huge resource in doing this.

Another thing that I did was. I have this pipeline of putting words that I didn't understand into Excel, then I would find a definition for them. But the definition has to be simple enough and preferably in Finnish or in my target language. And then I would find example sentences. Now this example sentences part was very hard. This was before chatGPT and I'll get to chatGPT in a moment. So I'll pick the word, I'll find the definition. I'll find, um, example sentences which are relevant to me that's important. Then I would put the words that I've found or that I've defined and had the example sentences for, put them into Quizlet, and then I would memorize them. And this was such a time consuming task because I had to understand the definition. I also had to find definitions that were simple enough and in a field that is relevant to me. Because if something's talking about, say, astrology, that doesn't interest me in any way. I don't know anything about it. So I wouldn't really get it. Uh, or biochemistry. I wouldn't get it either. It's not my field. Or some obscure sport that I've never played, I wouldn't, yeah. So it has to be relevant. I would sometimes struggle to find simple enough example sentences. So the definitions and example sentence would have words or phrases that I would have to also translate in the definition too. So. I have a word, I have the definition, I have the example sentence, but then it's so hard to find an example sentence that even in the example sentence, there's words that I don't understand. So I have in English next to it what it means. It was, it was quite messy occasionally, but it was progress and that was what it was important. Um, the example sentence is there's a service called Glosbe it is a searchable service that will give you sentences when you put in the word. And their texts are from human written public sources, like EU law, or laws of countries, or movie subtitles, the Bible, et cetera. So you get real sentences, especially the movie subtitle ones, they're real sentences that are spoken in human context. Now let me, lemme touch on chatGPT because the example sentences thing was very essential for my learning, but it took so much time. I remember the Excel sheet has about 500 words and I was only able to, over the course of the year, I was only able to do two hundred and forty, two hundred fifty to translate and get the example sentences for them. Only 240 and yeah, it was such a time consuming task. But with chatGPT I could have just put it in and it would've done it for me.

But, and before you asked why I didn't use chatGPT, we're talking 2022, it didn't exist. But on one hand I'm also glad it didn't exist because if it did all the new word definitions and example sentence finding for me, I would study a bit too passively. Since it didn't exist, I was required to be very manual about reading and understanding sentences before I put it in the Excel sheet. However, on other hand, I think chatGPT would also be very useful for things like speaking practice and writing practice. So maybe it could give me prompts that I would write and then when I'm done, I would put it back in there and tell it like, Hey, can you check how grammatically correct for me? Or I was. how Grammatically correct. I was. And make the corrections and stuff like that. Yeah.

Another thing is example phrases you, what you want to do is you know how you talk. There are certain sentences and phrases you use over and over again. What you want to do. You want to have a bank of phrases that you say quite often translated into your target language. So I had such a thing translated into Finnish. Uh, so for example, for me. Something that I, apparently, I didn't realize I say this that often, but now that I look back, 'cause now it's 2025, when I looked at my Excel sheet, the examples I find were some bizarre ones. Like, um, it was barely X o'clock, so it was barely seven o'clock or barely six o'clock. Like apparently that phrase I say that often, or it was, I found it in my Excel phrase or that phrase pretty much. Or another one is it did X and Y at the same time. So it was both refreshing and tiring at the same time. And apparently I, those were phrases that annoyed me 'cause I couldn't say, so I put it in the Excel and then I found the definition of it. Um, so yeah, I had them translated and memorized, so I don't, I don't have to think about translating them in the moment.

Then let's go to books. Books. I read, I read a lot of books so I could get new words. Uh, the new words I got were the ones that were went into the Excel sheet. I started with Don't Make My Mistake, I started with Sapiens by Yuval, Noah Harari, and I didn't know, because I hadn't read it in, in my native language, English. I didn't know. It was such a, like that level of reading required is a bit high for that one, and I struggled through that book for quite a long time, and at some point I realized I don't need words like. I asked my friend, what's the meaning of the word nisäkäs? 'cause I had just read it and it was just on my mind. And I hadn't put the word in my excel yet, but just off the cuff asked my friend what it means, and he was like, it means mammal. And I realized, I don't think I need words like mammal in my day-to-day language. Why am I reading this book? I don't need anthropological terms. Why am reading this book? So I, at that moment, had a reason to shelve that book. It finally gave me enough reason to shelve that book and pick a different one that was more day-to-day language. And what I did pick was this kon mari book by this Japanese lady, Marie Kondo, which is about sorting order in your house or having order in your house in terms of the things you own. And that was a great book 'cause it's spoken in simple enough language and then the. There was an old book from, I think the eighties or nineties by a North Korean spy who was involved in a plane crash. They planted a bomb on a South Korean plane, something like that. I read her story, I think it was called, tears of My Soul or Tears of My Heart, or something like that. That was a. Very interesting one. That was quite, it wasn't too challenging, but it was just a good level. And the, the whole trick about this is you want something that is difficult enough that there is new things to learn, but not too difficult that you give up. So with the sapiens book that was too difficult that I wanted to give up. But 'cause I had made such a public declaration, it kept me going for so long. But with that book, every sentence. Every line required me to use dictionary. And that was, it's, it was such Stop start, stop, start, stop, start that. It's not good for progress at all. You can't, nothing's flowing. 'cause Yeah.

And then now from books, we go to articles. I read a lot of articles, so things that I'm interested in already. So Football, Formula 1, I just recently hadn't gotten into Formula One at that point. Uh, I dunno, a bit of basketball news. Um, just all of my little interests here and there. Technology, what was happening in the stock market, stuff like that. And then, yeah, just the news. The news. Yes, the news. That was another one. So all of those just little articles, 'cause those ones they don't, they're not too long. So you have a feeling of accomplishment that you started it, you finished it, and it took you a few minutes to do and. And those kind of little wins just keep you going.

And, um, yeah, on the weekends I went to the library quite a lot, going through the Suomen Mestari books and solving the questions . I feel like a useful way of adding chatGPT to this process would be asking it for explanations of the grammatical things that I don't understand. There's a lot of things that I didn't fully get. The people who are immediately nearby in my life couldn't necessarily explain it. This is the thing about native speakers. People who understand languages natively, they have never had to analyze it. So when you ask them questions, they will not necessarily have an answer for you. If you ask me things in why some things are the way they are in English, I could, no, I couldn't tell you. It just comes naturally for me. So I've never had nobody thinks about why things work. We always think about why things don't work and because of that. Yeah, native speakers, we have almost never, unless they've studied literature extensively, have almost never had the need to analyze why the language I speak so well, does things in this way or that way. They just know how it's done and that's it.

Another great point was the fact that I was dating a Finnish lady back then. So there was a lot of questions to her, lot of moments where I would ask, Hey, how do you say this and Finnish? How do you, why is it like this? Why is this like that? And she was very intelligent, but again, she was a native speaker, so she's never had to really contend with why things are the way they are. She just knew she knew how to do them. And that's it.

And as I'm going through this, I just had a conversation recently with a friend that just came to mind. And it's on the concept or the topic of integration, which helps greatly with all of this. So a friend really recently told me when I, when I told them that I was doing this podcast about how they lived in Australia and they had a house where they rented out rooms and a lot of German exchange students would show up looking for a room and they would find out that there was another apartment with a German host and they would go there. Over time, you could see a clear difference in the improvement in English between those who went to the German apartment. To your comfort zone, essentially, versus those who stayed at his place because their common language was English. And I think this is a very important concept for learning the language because like I said, that I trying to simulate being somebody who didn't speak English. You speak English, you have to be conscious about the fact that you're trying to integrate into the country. Finland. I don't know how the process is, how the circumstances are in other countries, but I, I'm sure if you went to Spain, nobody would speak English to you, so you would learn Spanish quite quickly.

But yeah, so these are the concrete steps or little things that I did in order to tackle the six different parts of language learning. And I will be interviewing other people on how they were able to do this journey and what were their day-to-day things That helped. But for me, these were my day-to-day things that I did that helped. And trust me, it's a day-to-day thing. You can't escape it. Really can't escape it. Thank you and see you on the next one. Cheers. ​