Kseniia

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.