Guests

Chloe moved to Finland from the UK in October 2015 after a weekend trip to see Finnish rock music turned into something far bigger. At a Helsinki gig she met the man who would become her husband, and within two months she had relocated and married. Ten years on, she works as a project manager in the social field — in Finnish. Her learning journey is defined by rejecting the ‘Finnish is impossible’ narrative, setting small tangible goals, and weaving the language into everyday life rather than waiting for some distant moment of perfection.

Episode 13 →

Jamie McDonald — known online as HappeningFish — is a standup comedian and artist living in Finland. He took one of the most unconventional routes to Finnish fluency: getting on stage and performing comedy in a language he was still acquiring. Alongside his Finnish-speaking household and daily cultural immersion, Jamie used yoga classes, social circles, and the pressure of making Finnish audiences laugh as his classroom. He is one of the most honest voices on why you have to find a deeply personal reason to invest in a language that only a few million people speak.

Episode 12 →

Matthias moved to Finland from Germany in February 2020 — arriving just weeks before COVID-19 lockdowns began — having already memorised thousands of Finnish words from a vocabulary book before he ever set foot in the country. A research assistant working on physics at Aalto University, he reached fluency through a combination of pre-arrival obsession, choir singing, children's audiobooks on repeat, and the unconventional technique of conducting psychotherapy sessions entirely in Finnish to give the language an emotional anchor.

Episode 11 →

Hamed arrived in Finland from Iran in March 2004, landing in Oulu having not planned to settle there — or anywhere in Finland. For years he resisted the language, treating the country as a temporary stop. The shift came when he accepted Finland as home: he moved to Espoo in 2005, built genuine Finnish friendships, and discovered that expressing emotion in Finnish unlocked a fluency that formal classes had never reached. He now works as a software engineer and looks back on that mindset change as the single most important step in his language journey.

Episode 10 →

Kseniia moved from St. Petersburg to Jyväskylä at 18 to study international business at JAMK, with no plan to stay long-term and little interest in learning Finnish seriously. She spent years coasting on English, did an exchange year in the UK, and returned to Finland in 2019 in the middle of an identity search — deciding to make it home. Starting almost from scratch, she worked with Russian-speaking Finnish teachers, immersed herself in Finnish YouTube and TV, and learned to push through the discomfort of real conversations rather than waiting for perfection. A musician and singer, she is one of the more introspective voices in this series on what it means to choose a country and a language.

Episode 9 →

Jojo Pratt — born Godson, nicknamed Cyborg back in boarding school — arrived in Finland at the end of 2009 from Ghana via London, spending his first year in a Red Cross refugee camp with no Finnish and no plan. What followed was a relentless self-education: listening through classroom doors until the teacher started leaving the door open for him, absorbing every Finnish conversation within earshot, and refusing to let circumstance become an excuse. He eventually qualified as a nurse and built a life fully integrated into Finnish society — one of the most honest voices in this series on what learning a language with no safety net actually demands.

Episode 8 →

Magdalene Awahnde came to Finland from Cameroon around 2004, joining her husband who had already been there for several years. She arrived as a student and pivoted into healthcare — studying nursing while raising a family and learning Finnish in parallel. Over two decades she rose to nursing manager, a role she notes she was among the first Black women to hold in her field. Her philosophy was straightforward: she was here, this was her home, and she was going to learn the language — not because it was easy, but because belonging required it.

Episode 7 →

Emily came to Finland from Vietnam in 2012 to study international business on a free tuition scholarship — and spent years trying to leave. She lived in Spain and the Netherlands for a year each as part of her studies, assumed Finland was temporary, and kept Finnish firmly on the back burner. It was only after deciding to stay for good — realising that citizenship, career, and belonging all required it — that she committed to the language. She found her breakthrough with a Vietnamese-speaking Finnish tutor and pushed through the intermediate plateau that stops many learners. She now runs her own hairdressing business in Helsinki.

Episode 6 →

Deborah Laajanen is a licensed attorney from the Philippines who moved to Finland in 2021 after marrying a Finn. Back home she had spent years earning a bachelor's degree, a juris doctor, and clearing the bar exam — none of which counted for much in a Finnish job market that required advanced Finnish even for paralegal roles. She turned that frustration into fuel: studying on and off over three years through a difficult pregnancy and major life adjustments, she passed the demanding valtionhallinnon kielitutkinto exam and earned a place at the University of Helsinki Law School to study a master of laws entirely in Finnish.

Episode 5 →

Erik Åkesson is a Swedish banker who moved to Finland around 2015 after a career spanning London, Copenhagen, and Stockholm — most recently as global head of foreign exchange trading at Danske Bank. With a Finnish wife and four kids each born in a different country, learning Finnish was always the intention but a high-pressure career left no space for it. A 15-month paternity leave changed everything: with a quieter mind and a baby asleep in a pram outside the restaurant window, he paid for over 100 lunches with retired Finns who would speak only Finnish with him, worked through three Suomen mestari books with a private teacher, and forced Finnish into every haircut, taxi ride, and errand he could.

Episode 4 →

Anita Anttila arrived in Finland in 1996 — before Google Translate, Duolingo, or social media — as a young mother in a small town near Seinäjoki where almost no one spoke English and Finnish was unavoidable from day one. She learned her first words from a dictionary and got through early months by pointing at items in shops. Her journey took a harrowing turn when a language barrier during her divorce left her without custody of her sons — the moment she describes as the real turning point that made fluency non-negotiable. Thirty years on, she works in restaurant service and speaks Finnish with the ease of someone who has lived it rather than studied it.

Episode 3 →

Oheneba — known as Ohe — is the creator and host of How I Learned Finnish. This episode is his own story: in 2022, he publicly committed to speaking Finnish whenever possible for an entire year, having concluded that simulating the conditions of a non-English speaker was the only reliable path to reflex-level fluency. He built daily habits around Finnish podcasts, a vocabulary-building Excel sheet, translated phrase banks, and reading books entirely in Finnish. By summer he had already landed a new job partly because of how well he spoke the language — and came out of the year with the fluency he had set out to find.

Episode 2 →