Beginners' Course in Finnish

[bondgirl]

MOIKKA!
It is my ultimate dream to study Finnish properly, and I believe the only way to properly achieve fluency in the language is by living in the country and studying there.
I've found a course for beginners' Finnish: https://university.helsinki.fi/en/finni ... foreigners. I'm looking into Suomi 1 (I know really basic Finnish, and some odd nouns and verbs, but I need to learn A LOT more!).
Has anyone ever studied this course? Or another similar course? (Online or otherwise!)
Is it possible to do for a 24-year-old English gal with very little knowledge on the language and can only recognise a few words and sentences?
I'm very eager to do this. Any advice on any available courses for non-residents/foreigners would be greatly appreciated! Kiitos!

[caster]

try searching a course here: https://ilmonet.fi/#en/search/cgt=116

[Rosamunda]

I can strongly recommend courses at Helsingin Aikuisopisto (http://www.hao.fi) which are similar in price, ie expensive, but you will get much more out of them. For me they get the top marks for beginners, of all the places I've studied.

I thought they were very good too but that goes back a few years! I did four courses there with three different teachers. The first course was a bit boring (plodded through a coursebook) but the rest were interactive, convivial even... fun!

I never understood why those Summer Uni courses insist on teaching mountains of grammar to people who have no vocabulary. Where is the sense in that. It's like trying to build a house with just mortar, no bricks. For a long time my kids were having similar problems in school: they were getting cloze/gapfill homework exercises where they had to inflect nouns and conjugate verbs. They managed to do most of the sentences correctly without actually understanding a single word. Finnish is weird like that. You can do the grammar without knowing the vocab as long as you memorise the rules.

[Querfeldein]

I am also looking at options for a summer course in Finnish (see this thread for some advice I got). As I will be working at the University of Helsinki (although my employment begins on October 1st, hence I don't yet have access to their intranet, which is supposed to contain additional information), I have written to their language office to get some additional advice. Apart from that, I am leaning towards the course at Jyväskylän University, which seems to be the most intense (5 lessons per day) and the only one I found that specifies a maximum class size (15). By comparison, Helsinki's 52 lessons over 4 weeks works out to just under 2 per day - even though there is self study, that does not sound very intensive to me if, as in my case, my goal was to spend those weeks primarily studying Finnish. On the other hand, the Jyväskylä course is also the most expensive by quite some margin.