@rolle When I went to Oulu for a residency in 2019, I tried my best to learn at least basic Finnish. I always want to try to learn the language of a place if I intend on staying a while, plus at least in previous times in Europe, sometimes (or often?) not knowing the language was considered bothersome by residents. (Understandable but it made my anxiety spike when I would say something wrong and suddenly blamed for it lol)
I obviously failed at Finnish because it was much harder than I thought :zerotwo: Only managed to learn Terve (and in turn Tervetuola because of shared root word), and I already knew Kiitos for many years thanks to...Nightwish LOL. But when I arrived, it was made very clear that was it absolutely fine to not know Finnish, but that even Finns know how hard it is! It made me feel a lot more comfortable being "stupid", even though I still felt bad about not having been able to learn it.
I did take one class of Sami thanks to a student who invited me for one day (as she was taking Sami) and it was fun to talk to her, as her husband was from the US and her husband and I shared POVs on Finland when talking, and how he manages to survive while learning Finnish slowly.
One thing I remember my students saying is that for many young people, they speak English way more than Finnish, just because of the global world, and sometimes even prefer it--and how some older folk don't like that tendency. I thought that was super interesting. And yes, I was told confidently that, with exception of some rural places of course, you can survive with English!
Being from Puerto Rico as well, I ended up having discussions and shared similarities about "small country" issues or outlooks. Including our style of sarcasm and dark humor!
Overall, I felt very much like I could be myself in Finland and sometimes wish I could move there. Alas, not in the cards anytime soon.
Anyway, I only ended up learning 5 new words, only remembering two: one because it's chocolate (suklaa!) and the other is "joo." Oh, and learning how to pronounce "sorry" the Finnish way XD
rolle