Finnish is funnish?

This post could end up being rather long, so I don't mind (and won't even know) if you take a break. But my relationship to Finnish began before I could speak any language whatsoever, so it's been a long one. And although several years ago I made my peace with never getting any better at it, life has a way of shaking up your suppositions about "the rest of my life", so the story is nowhere near over.

You should know that it's pretty much impossible to learn Finnish. I could talk about it in technical terms like agglutinative and highly inflected languages, but basically, it's not Indo-European (which means you can't get very far based on languages you already know, unless they happen to be Estonian and, well, Estonian), it has 14 cases, and it doesn't distinguish between "he" and "she". The word "mother" is pretty similar in Indo-European languages: Mutter, mere, mama -- but in Finnish it's äiti. That will give you some sense of its weirdness. And I'm not saying this so you will be impressed with the fact that I know any Finnish at all, but to give you some idea of the effort it takes to learn it.

My mother made an effort, and it was quickly quashed. She was the first non-Finn to marry into my father's family, and she wanted to make a good impression on his grandmother (whom we always called Mumma). So she asked him to teach her how to say, "Grandmother, may I pour you more coffee?" He trained with her for several weeks until the big day came. After my mother said her sentence, coffee pot in hand, in the presence of not only Mumma but also the aunts and uncles, there was a shocked silence; Mumma, no dummy, looked at my father with a stern gaze and scolded him by his Finnish name, Rolanti. Meanwhile, Rolanti was laughing so hard he could barely catch his breath. My mother had said the equivalent of "The n**ger is standing behind the tree." Although her foray into learning the Finnish language was brief and traumatic, my father's treachery probably did more to endear her to her new family than the most perfect Finnish phrase could have done.

Had I known that story when I was ten years old, I might not have tried to get my father to teach me Finnish. We went to Fairport Harbor almost every weekend when we lived in Ohio, and I always heard the relatives talking about us kids. I wanted to know what they were saying, and I wanted to be able to talk to Mumma, who would bake nisua for us and serve us milk in clear glasses with thin rings of color running horizontally around them. I can still see them, still smell the nisua, and still hear her say the only English words she knew: "milk" and "I love you". You can get pretty far with those words, but I wanted more. I wanted in.

I had a brand-new Barbie diary, bound in shiny red plastic, that I got as a birthday present, and I figured it was a perfect place to record one word a day. If I could get a new Finnish word each day, I would eventually know the Finnish language. But my father always found reasons not to give me a word. He was either too tired, couldn't think of one, made a silly one up, or, on one occasion, gave me one so hard that I nearly cried from frustration at not being able to pronounce it to his standards. I soon gave up the project. But a few years later, I bought a "Teach yourself Finnish" book at Topanga Plaza, our local mall, and I took it with me whenever I babysat, writing out complex flash cards with nouns and cases and English translations. I even did the end-of-the-chapter exercises. I'm not sure how far it took me, but it was a better tool than asking my father to help me.

Finally, when I started college at UCLA, I was able to take a real Finnish class, and at the end of the year I got to go to Lappeenranta for a Finnish-government sponsored month-long language class. My father, to his credit, paid my airfare, which I'm certain was a financial strain. I went on to take Finnish in Sweden as a graduate student and to go to Lappeenranta for another month-long jaunt. But that was the end of my formal Finnish-language career. By then my focus had turned to Sweden and the Swedish language, which was far easier to pick up than Finnish. Though I kept it up enough to talk to relatives when I would visit and to write a little paragraph to my grandmother now and again, it never got to the point of pure fluency.

How I got to where I am now would take another long post. But I shake my head now at how improbable this is, this return to my benevolent nemesis. I haven't tried to do anything with Finnish for decades. I can stumble by in Finnish. I can tell my relatives things about my life, and I probably sound like I'm about seven years old. I can take care of simple errands in a shop, and, if I focus intently, I can get the gist of about 70 percent of what I hear. But seeing a long text in Finnish makes me feel like I'm on the high dive. In the past I've simply turned back and said, "I'll be braver next time." This is "next time". Now. I have to deal with e-mails at the university, official documents, faculty meetings and newspapers. And I am determined to do this thing, this long slow upward slope of language acquisition, one more time.

It's not all hard work, though. The old joy of learning a new language is there. I may not be as thrilled to write vocabulary cards or to try out new sounds, but the excitement of discovery can still kick in. Yesterday, while driving around northern Joensuu with Sisko and Juhani, I kept noticing place names that ended with -kangas (=cloth). I've mixed that word up with other -as words like "rengas" (=tire), but this time I was proud that I had remembered it. I wanted to try to ask if there had been textile industries in the area, but it was a bit beyond what I could do, so I pointed to Sisko's jacket and asked, "Kangas?" She turned the jacket so I could see the inside and said the equivalent of "Yes, this is a nice, warm jacket because of the layers." (I should point out that Sisko and Juhani, who have infinite patience for this sort of thing, have never learned a foreign language, going to school in rural, impoverished Finland during World War II.) I tried again: "Raatekangas? Käpykangas?" Juhani caught on and said the equivalent of "Oh, that's a different kind of 'kangas'". He pointed to the woods and said, "That's kangas -- forest with moss and berries and such." I looked in my dictionary and I will copy here what it said:
KANGAS  1. cloth, material   2. canvas 3. a dry peaty forest with heavy moss and lichen cover
I was first of all incredibly amused that Finnish has a specific word for this kind of forest, and tickled that it would be equated with material, because it does look like a soft blanket lying under the trees. And now I'll know what that word means in place names. You need these small moments of delight in the desert slog edged with grammar mistakes and fatigue.

There's much more to say, but you're probably fatigued as well. I'll save it for another day.