Very few adult immigrants in Finland ever reach C-level Finnish – and most never even hear about those who do.
Deborah is one of the few. She moved to Finland in 2021 and in just 3 years, learned enough Finnish to get accepted into the University of Helsinki Law School. She reached C level fluency in just 3 years – all while being pregnant, parenting a newborn, and adjusting to a completely new country and climate.
In this "How I Learned Finnish" interview, we talk about:
- How she broke past the terrible intermediate plateau
- Why most language classes weren’t enough
- Why integration is a two-way street
- Concrete methods, study plans, and real-life routines that helped her pass the advanced government language exam ( Valtionhallinnon kielitutkinnot VKT)
- How her mindset helped her push through
This interview is part of "How I Learned Finnish", a non-profit interview series where I speak with adult immigrants who’ve reached advanced Finnish fluency. Everyone shares what worked for them so you can choose the methods that works for you.
🎧 Listen/Watch on Spotify
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts
(fixed repost for spamminess).
by pokumars
17 comments
[deleted]
Impressive achievement!
Oh great, now I feel even worse about my progress in learning the language 🙁
Kudos to Debora, though. Good job! 👍
`!remove` and ban the spammer please
It is written that it takes about 3 years to learn fluent Finnish and about 5 to sound like a native. It just takes motivation, like with all languages.
Finnish is not an impossibly difficult language. There are language difficulty categories for English speakers:
[https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/blog/fsi-language-difficulty/](https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/blog/fsi-language-difficulty/)
category 1: 24 weeks – for example Swedish
category 2: 30 weeks – for example German
category 3: 36 weeks – for example Malaysian
category 4: 44 weeks – for example Finnish, Estonian, Hindi, Hebrew, Turkish, Greek, Russian
category 5: 88 weeks – for example Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean
As one can see, the difficult ones in category 5 are such that lots of people learn. Nobody says it is impossible to learn Chinese, Japanene or Arabic, right? Finnish takes about 50% more effort than learning German (44 vs 30 weeks). Lots of people learn Swedish and German in Finnish school. Nobody says it is impossible.
Motivation. Motivation. Motivation.
There was a similar very positive news (in HS?) about an immigrant child who moved to Finland and learned Finnish so she could pass matriculation exam (ylioppilaskoe) in Finnish. Again, good work! I think those good performers are just not often mentioned in news. Just like all those people from other countries working in Finland – lots of them speak good Finnish. I would guess similarly a Finnish person moving to Japan or China would not make news even though they learn the local (much more difficult) language.
I call paskanmarja.
Insane determination to do this. Makes me feel like I made too many excuses
I was an exchange student, I learned passable Finnish in four months. After that it was just picking up vocabulary. The weird thing is 30+ years later I still remember about 90% of it.
Personally I think 99% just don’t have the motivation to learn the language properly, because it’s not expected of them, and it totally should be expected of them.
I think its great to see things like this, learning Finnish (or any language for that matter) is often intimidating and most people think by going to a class they will just absorb it, I’m currently learning progressing pretty fast at Finnish and have done so by using methods people often use for learning Japanese. Like you’ve said before most people who achieve very high Finnish fluency did when they couldn’t speak English beforehand so it’s always motivating to see exceptions
`!remove`
Interesting chat – you mentioned youre a software dev, and used podcasts to help your learning, could you share which ones you find the most useful/interesting?
Ehh, why bother. Finnish isn’t exactly a useful language to learn. I’d rather spend those 3 years doing literally anything else.
The way i see it, if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. But hey, what do i know. I’m just another dumb foreigner trying to make it through.
Three years? I don’t buy it. Makes for a cool story, though.
I’ve lived here for 13 years and I have to come to terms with the fact that I will likely never learn Finnish. It makes me sad, nevertheless I have the utmost respect for those people who manage it.
Wink emoji if u know Metropolia
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