Live data from Hacker News

A guide to freelancing in Finland

github.com

11–20 of 149 posts

Re: A guide to freelancing in Finland

#11
post #9

This is really great, thank you. Maybe I missed this bit but I noticed the guide doesn't touch on language issues at all, how hard is the transition for someone who doesn't speak Finnish?

Finnish is an absolutely atrocious language to learn for most people (unless you are already familiar with learning a language with a completely different root, and even then). That part will be hard. I can't comment on the practicality of surviving with only English (or even Swedish, which most of them speak due to historical factors that I will politely gloss over), because I haven't tried.

It is possible to survive in Helsinki with only minimal Finnish, and work in the IT-industry. In smaller places it might be more difficult, but certainly people here are willing and able to converse in English.

Of course I would like to learn more Finnish, but daily life and childcare interferes with regular lessons. (Of course being able to work in English also means that speaking Finnish at work is also difficult.)

Since moving to Finland four years ago I've bought a couple of flats, found a job, filed taxes, visited doctors, dentists, and similar things all in English.

I understand a lot of Finnish, I just speak less. Ordering food, etc, is something I'd usually do in Finnish although it has to be said a lot of people will either initially greet me in English, or reply to me in English which is a bit frustrating.

Re: A guide to freelancing in Finland

#16
post #9

This is really great, thank you. Maybe I missed this bit but I noticed the guide doesn't touch on language issues at all, how hard is the transition for someone who doesn't speak Finnish?

Finnish is an absolutely atrocious language to learn for most people (unless you are already familiar with learning a language with a completely different root, and even then). That part will be hard. I can't comment on the practicality of surviving with only English (or even Swedish, which most of them speak due to historical factors that I will politely gloss over), because I haven't tried.

>absolutely atrocious

I just want to underline that, unlike most European languages, Finnish grammar is highly systematic, and so is Finnish pronunciation. Very few exceptions, it feels almost mathematical in nature.

There's quite a lot of grammar, putting off non-nerds who think "cases" are hard because after all, they are hard in eg German and Latin (they're peanuts in Finnish). But for a geek with mathy tendencies, Finnish grammar is a warm shower compared to eg Polish or French or, for that matter, English. It's all so super consistent, it's as if it's a designed language.

A fun exercise when learning Finnish is writing a tool that can conjugate verbs or nouns, which is totally feasible in an evening or two, showing just how straight forward the grammar is.

The pronunciation is also super consistent and phonetic, which means that if someone teaches you a word or a name, you can simply hear how it's spelled. This makes it much easier to remember the word, since you can store the sound and the letters visually in memory, even if nobody writes it down for you.

Another fun hobby project is coding a Finnish speech synthesizer. You could just have it concatenate audio fragments for each letter. It'll sound like shit but it'll actually be understandable.

The real challenge with Finnish is the vocabulary.

(source: I'm Dutch, lived in Finland for a year half a life ago, tried to learn the language, walked away speaking it close to accent-free and knowing all the grammar but still not able to understand shit because seriously not a single word is anything like anything else I knew) (except appelsiini)

Re: A guide to freelancing in Finland

#19

I hope this will start a trend. A tech meme of sorts - virally producing amazing and useful content with the same theme. :)

It's gone semi viral I guess.. cuz it's now trending on github and it was #1 on /Finland subreddit when I posted it 3 days ago. I'd personally love to see this for other countries, maybe specially Nordics ones cuz that's easier to implement cuz of the similarities I think.

[1] http://github.com/trending

Post reply on HN