About Understanding / Ymmärryksestä
I’ve been training how to speak English for over a decade now. In Finland, most people have learnt English since elementary school as a mandatory part of the curriculum. We learnt proper UK pronunciation, we watched The Simpsons, we did everything in school and outside of it to maintain an active relationship to this fun and somewhat easy language. The English-speaking media world was a non-escapable thing, whether we wanted it or not: we watched most of the English movies and series with Finnish subtitles, dubbings were for some children’s movies only. So naturally, I thought I’d have pretty solid English skills at the ripe age of 21.
Yet coming to New Zealand, I have found my means of verbal communication to be somewhat lacking. It’s not like I don’t lose words speaking in Finnish as well, but this time it’s different. If I hit my head and all of a sudden couldn’t speak English anymore, I’d be completely lost. What sounds like a plot to a heart-warming B-list movie would be a nightmare in real life.
The truth behind this horror image is, as always, much more complicated. While speaking English, I find that some of the things I’m saying just don’t sound exactly like I want them to sound. I’m not always able to communicate the full length of the emotion and experience. This sounds like nitpicking and it probably is that to some extent, but sometimes I can’t help but wonder how much better I could be understood if I knew English just a little bit better.
Everyone who’s interested in language knows how delicious words can feel. When you’re able to find the exact words to describe experiences, find connections or just rant about something that went wrong… It’s amazing. I start to sound like Anne of Green Gables here, but there is a certain kind of magic to words like miraculous, ludicrous, puff sleeves or silk.
As is for words like koti, lempi, ikävä or Teini-ikäiset mutanttininjakilpikonnat. Yes, the latter one is a Finnish translation for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Isn’t that just beautiful?
I’d better stop. I start to get all sentimental. I’m not loving languages this much, I do have other things in my mind as well. But if language is just a vessel, it’s a damn good one. Or, as I’d say in Finnish, tosi tärkeä. This is where the practical side steps in. Most of my thoughts are still in Finnish, and a constant translation process is not always easy. Especially when trying to create something new.
Recently, I was in a theatre class trying to form characters for our piece (we perform in the end of trimester, come to see us!). I got frustrated, because the words and sentences that came in to my mind were in Finnish, and they were complicated. Words like urakehitys, progressing in one’s career, or värttinä, the spindle of a spinning wheel. The teacher saved me by proposing I’d just say everything in Finnish first.
I’m very sorry for those classmates who had been filling their water bottles outside of the room and walked in just to see me in the middle of the stage shouting in Finnish.
Improvising a monologue is one thing, doing that while knowing that no one will understand you is another. However, understanding in this literal, verbal sense is not always the most important thing there is to find. Real moments of connection require sometimes much less than that. Laughing is one example of this.
This was a story about finding yet another thing I’m privileged at, but it’s also a point of relocating myself in relation to language. I’ve been a grammar police and a rhyme lover, now it’s time to be something else and more.
I’m going to be a person with easily understandable facial expressions, y’all!
The Finnish line is a column series by Martta Tikka, an exchange student from Finland. In this column series, they talk about their experiences about Aotearoa, its people and events.
