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Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

helsinkibusinesshub.fi

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Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#451

Post by distances »

6177c40f wrote: post #35
Devils-Avocado wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: 24% VAT (sales tax) 18% employer payroll taxes 10% employee payroll taxes 20-30% typical income tax Take your American disposable income and cut it in half. Still worth it for 'free' education and 'free' healthcare? Also a lot of cold and darkness.

Would you not be saving (or at least not spending more) money by not having to pay for your healthcare needs. Besides the fact that if the rents really are cheap, then that would also be a huge savings for a lot of people.

Rents are not cheap, except maybe if compared to SF.

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#452

Post by danjac »

titanomachy wrote: post #345
danjac wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that difficult. Grammar is logical, few exceptions, not many hard sounds to learn for English speakers. I found it easier than Russian for example (took the YKI test for citizenship some years ago).

My inlaws are Finnish... the total lack of germanic/romance cognates makes it very difficult for me to remember any vocabulary. But I've never really put in a serious effort to learn it.

The cognates are difficult, true - there are quite a few old Indo-European words if you know where to look (kulta - gold, kuningas - king, ranta from Swedish strand, i.e. shore). That said, once you've built up a core vocabulary, it's quite easy to learn derived words. For example, kirja, kirjasto, kirjoittaa, kirje - book, library, write, letter. By comparison, you can see how much different all the equivalent English words are due to its mixed Germanic and French/Latin vocabulary, and how much a challenge that makes for non-native learners.

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#453

Post by piva00 »

waihtis wrote: post #311
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As extra for the language. Even in tech you should just accept that you NEED to start learning Finnish. You don't have to be proficient speaker, but for normal office chat you need to be good enough to interrupt and step in with English if you want to participate. I've seen many foreigners quit because they felt like they were intentionally left out of casual conversations, but you really have to understand that spea…

Problem is that it's a super difficult language where you can't draw any help from any other languages you might now. Plus it's obscure and if you move out of Finland you'll likely never use it again. I can see why people don't want to invest huge amounts of time learning it unless they plan to stay for the rest of their lives.

Take this as someone who moved to Sweden and have learned a bit of the language, I don't speak Finnish but have had contact with it through Finnish friends for 5+ years now.

Finnish is hard just because it's too different from our Indo-European languages mental model.

On the other hand, Finnish is easy to pick up if you are going to study it because the written form is very close to the spoken one (even though spoken it will be more colloquial Finnish). If you learn the phonemes you will know how to pronounce words, easily, train your ears to its core minimal pairs and it will help a lot.

The grammar is logical, there are a few exceptions per case, it's just very different from Indo-European languages.

I agree that it's very obscure but I take that for Swedish with the silver lining that learning an obscure language will be, in the worst case, a good party trick.

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#454

Post by vinay427 »

alibarber wrote: post #417
david-gpu wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving to a new country and complaining that not all jobs and services are provided to you in your own foreign language comes across as entitled. Of course you need to learn the language of the nation that hosts you. You are an immigrant.

Not sure people are complaining as such. And these comments are on a piece from a country's government that is literally offering to pay people to move there. It's more of a word of warning, Finnish is a difficult language for a native English speaker to learn compared to, say, French, or even Swedish. Something like Spanish is spoken by a massive number of people in multiple nations - Finnish only in one small one.…

> compared to, say, French, or even Swedish.

I'm not sure the "even" is actually appropriate here. Both Swedish and French (along with probably every other Western European Indo-European language) are among the easiest for English speakers to learn. Swedish also has a disproportionate amount of resources online due in part to immigration patterns, as I understand it.

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#455

Post by swebs »

brobinson wrote: post #102
nstj wrote: post #17

> Experience four seasons: changes in weather and daylight are a feature and not a bug This looks like a wonderful offering. With phrases like the above it looks to be one of the first of its nature where government _gets_ the needs of remote tech workers.

I've heard from Finns that summer is the "nicest week of the year" so I'm gonna take the four seasons claim with a grain of salt.

This is all you need to see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki#Climate

Personally, I really enjoy the summers where it rarely goes above 20C/70F. The only real complaint is the amount of daylight in the winter. Look at the mean monthly sunshine hours in that chart.

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#456

Post by waihtis »

Kliment wrote: post #400
waihtis wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is that it's a super difficult language where you can't draw any help from any other languages you might now. Plus it's obscure and if you move out of Finland you'll likely never use it again. I can see why people don't want to invest huge amounts of time learning it unless they plan to stay for the rest of their lives.

I'm a non-native Finnish speaker. I learned the language in my teens. It's not a difficult language, at all. It is actually surprisingly simple. The problem is the obscurity - there is very little interest in Finnish as a second language, and the teaching community for it is small and hasn't developed the kind of resources that imperial languages that were taught to countless millions of people during the age of empi…

[fyi: native Finn]

> b) this is controversial but I think the standard language model used by linguists is too strongly inspired by Latin and a very poor fit for Finnish. I find trying to learn grammar formally is counterproductive and will set you back. Instead, think of the noun suffixes as a preposition equivalent. Trying to think of them as cases will mess with your progress

Interesting point. This is what a lot of people learning the language tend to get overtly confused with. Perhaps your point isn't as controversial as one would think...

> j) It may appear superficially that all the vocabulary is weird and foreign but a whole lot of it is borrowed, just borrowed a long way back. Not so useful early on but you pick up some patterns eventually. A number of phrases are word for word translations from other languages - for example "elintarvike" (food products, groceries) is a word for word translation of German "Lebensmittel". Learning German after Finnish I found a lot of familiar phrases. Going further back, you see a ton of germanic roots in everyday words like "tuoli" (chair). It's not obvious at first until you look at the Estonian version "tool", which is an earlier form of the same word. That is of course an abbreviated version of "stool"/"Stuhl" which is clearly germanic. Again, this won't help you learn new vocabulary but it may help with the feeling of "what the fuck how do they come up with this shit" that you get on first exposure to a new language group.

hehe, yeah that's the second difficult part of the equation. Trouble is that we also borrow a lot from Swedish (which isn't too far from German, but still) and also Russian.

But you're right in that the word formations themselves are pretty logical (maybe this is a Germanic thing?) - for example, computer [tietokone] is literally "information machine", airplane [lentokone] is "flying machine", and my favourite example is the old word for television [näköradio] which is literally "vision radio."

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#457

Post by exDM69 »

legohead wrote: post #263
deanc wrote: post #190

Overall my experience in Helsinki has been hugely positive. I’ve been here now over a decade and have settled with work and family life. Work life balance is great, there’s a beautiful outdoors to enjoy all year, and the people are warm and kind, if not difficult to start with. All that said, there’s a lot of bullshit and hot air here in this thread: - public healthcare is great until you have something difficult to…

Can you pay for private dentists, or similar, if you need more immediate service? And is the wait similar for major things like cancer, brain tutor, or heart surgery?

> And is the wait similar for major things like cancer, brain tutor, or heart surgery?

No.

For serious illness or acute accident that needs hospitalization, the public health care is excellent and fast. And it won't bankrupt you, even for the most demanding medical care (usually you pay small flat fee for every day you're hospitalized).

For non-urgent doctor's visits and routine dental care, not so much. Wait times can be long and the system can be quite frustrating. It's a bit better for children.

Most employers in tech sector (and most white collar work, even some blue collar work) will have additional health care benefits that will get you your doctor's or dentist's appointment faster from a private health care provider. You can get insurance or pay out of pocket too.

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#458

Post by waihtis »

piva00 wrote: post #453
waihtis wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is that it's a super difficult language where you can't draw any help from any other languages you might now. Plus it's obscure and if you move out of Finland you'll likely never use it again. I can see why people don't want to invest huge amounts of time learning it unless they plan to stay for the rest of their lives.

Take this as someone who moved to Sweden and have learned a bit of the language, I don't speak Finnish but have had contact with it through Finnish friends for 5+ years now. Finnish is hard just because it's too different from our Indo-European languages mental model. On the other hand, Finnish is easy to pick up if you are going to study it because the written form is very close to the spoken one (even though spoken…

> a good party trick

Correct - I guarantee you can generate a lot of goodwill (and possibly free drinks) from drunken Finns on the Helsinki-Stockholm booze ferries.

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#459

Post by swebs »

sudhirj wrote: post #172
mensetmanusman wrote: post #28

‘ We’re not after your money but all about lasting relationships. ‘ Sounds legit

Might not be. The Nordic states seem rich enough already. Norway, for example, has a fund that makes all its citizens millionaires, so you do get richer if you join them. Can’t speak for Finland, but because it’s a welfare state you are going to get more than you give, at least until you start making serious money. I think they realise that immigration helps counter stagnation, especially if their population is aging…

Norway is an extreme outlier due to their state controlled oil fund. You'd be better comparing them to Saudi Arabia than Finland. (Finland has no petroleum resources)

Re: Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

#460

Post by exDM69 »

juskrey wrote: post #269
legohead wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you pay for private dentists, or similar, if you need more immediate service? And is the wait similar for major things like cancer, brain tutor, or heart surgery?

You can, but what is the point of high taxes then?

Examples:

If you get in a car accident, have a stroke, drug overdose or get cancer, you get almost free world class treatment in the public hospital urgently.

If you hurt your knee while playing tennis but it doesn't prevent you from working and living a normal life (but you can't play tennis with it), you go on the low priority surgery waiting list for public health care or get it faster from private sector via insurance or paying out of pocket.

Does this make sense?

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