University of Helsinki

I believe that the time spend in Finland has chenged me more than I have expected. My life and education in Helsinki helped me to achieve exceptional communication skills as finns are very shy and no comunicativ people. One should really work hard in order to be accepted. There is a finnish saying "If you make a friend in Finland it is a friend for life". The Finnish language course helped me a lot in my every-day life. However it is hard to speak Finnish with the local students and teachers as they switch to English as soon as they find out one is not of a Finnish origin. May be this is the reason why my skills in English have developed so well.

Although Finnish is the national language in Finland, almost everyone can speak English, so i didn't have communication problems. I spent most of my time with British and Irish people, which gave me the opportunity to improve my English considerably.

The reason why I came to Finalnd was to learn Finnish. I am a translator and I wanted to learn it as best as I could. That's why I tried to meet Finnish people, because I was interested n their language and culture. However, year is not enough for learning the Finnish language. That's why I'm back in Finland, but this time working for a Finnish company and speaking Finnish 24 hours/day!

If you want to learn fluent Finnish, Helsinki is NOT the place to study. Most Finns speak English very well, and automatically switch to English when they hear you are a foreigner (even when you don't want them too)! I was disappointed that I didn't learn any more Finnish than I knew before I arrived. Another barrier to learning Finnish was the fact that the local students themselves are often shy and you really have to put for an effort YOURSELF if you want to get to know them. I often found myself hanging out with other international students, and even though I had a blast, English was pretty much the common language among us.

Finland, like any other Scandinavian country, has an unbelieveable rate of fluent English speakers so, getting along in English was not a problem at all. Not even with sixty year-old people!!!

I did not use to speak finnish in there, because my instruction was in english and all people know english in that country. They have no problems to communicate in english.