Reckon They Could Use A Degreeless Linguist?

[odon]

"Reckon They Could Use A Degreeless Linguist?"

To the orginal question, here in finland, it is common to find the finnish youngsters aged 18 -23 studying 3 languages or more, i happen to know a 18yr old, who finnished her high school, came out with these languages, Finnish, english, swedish,german, french!!
As u go through stockmann, u will see that most of them do speak 3-4 language, and they are ordinary finns....the younger generation...so if u come here 10yrs down the line, you will be just like the normal young finns.....multi-lingaul.....but could u land a job?, if u r smart, hard working..yes some job....but a good job, demands...degress, or higher...

[EP]

they are ordinary finns....the younger generation...

Not necessarily just the younger generation. I am certainly a representave of the granny generation, and at school I had 8 years of English, 7 years of Swedish, 5 years of German, and 3 years of both Russian and Latin. And a little after school I learned French. And no, I am not a linguist.

[Karhunkoski]

And just to bring some balance to EP's "representation" of the average Finnish granny being a linguist's wet dream....I also know some Finnish grannies for whom state education effectively ended at age 14/15 (In the early 1950s), and they've never spoke anything but Savo.

Multiple language skills are certainly something that the Finnish youth should be proud of, but at least in my experience, the average Finn over the age of 45-55 is certainly not so cunning in their linguistics.

[Upphew]

(You probably know this, but most Americans speak English with a growing minority speaking both English and Spanish, but beyond that, a bilingual is an accomplishment. In my county, high schools require people to take two years of a foreign language, but hardly anyone has a commitment, so the classes get dumbed down.)

My HS English teacher would say something along these lines: "English hard? I can teach German Shepherd to speak it, but I don't want to use the same methods on you! So here is some bonus homework for you so I don't have to yell to you as I would have to yell at dog..." So no dumbing down, quite the opposite of that...
And I wouldn't say that we were very committed to learning English (although we, at least I, were very committed _not_ to learn Swedish, just pass it..).

[Lazydriver]

I still think this has to be some kind of joke. You are unreal and crack me up so much. In a way though, it would be nice for you to come here and invent something for Finland to help them out.

And don't count on any mexican food anywhere close to what you can get over there in your neck of the woods, unless you make it yourself of course.

Nah, I'm not joking. I'm just asking questions I can't seem to find in any FAQ anywhere else.

It's a beautiful state, but the people themselves are of, well, they're all different

Finland ain't Kansas either Dorothy.

and I can't really read that link

click on the pdf files on the right, they're the "short" languages tests. "englanti" for example is English, "saksa" German etc.

AND I LIVE IN SIN CITY AND THEY TEACH IT LIKE THAT

I thought you guys would be whiz kids in maths...

Granny has a winning streak at the casino and wins a jackpot.
a) Calculate with what velocity the tub of dollars will impact her foot as she drops it when she hits the jackpot.
b) Calculate what % of the winnings is pocketed by the lawyer after granny sues the casino.

Also, do they have some Mexican food there? Or just things like "Taco Bell"?

I think you can buy beans at the store. Fast food... I think McD's is going bankrupt but nobodys crazy enough to take it over...

ROFL! Shame they don't have problems like that, I think students would crack up laughing at problems like that. Though the coins dropping in Vegas now is just an electronic illusion (for the most part, it's to make everyone think there is someone winning, but don't let that stop you coming here!), but I don't want to kill your joke. The only trick is to get it through the "Politically Correct" crowd over here that complains about silly things like that (mostly lawyers). Anyway, thanks for the link, I'll check it out. I'd assume American is Amerikani? I didn't bother to check. As for the Mexican food, I just meant a few real Mexican resturants (not just fast food like Taco Bell). Hmm, there's an idea, find some Mexicans who want a better chance there for their families then in America...

It depresses me a bit that I wouldn't be able to get a job using my language skills. Well, just to GET A JOB I need them, but they will not be overkill for it. Ah well, Finnish is still a lovely language and very flexible, so why not anyway?

My HS English teacher would say something along these lines: "English hard? I can teach German Shepherd to speak it, but I don't want to use the same methods on you! So here is some bonus homework for you so I don't have to yell to you as I would have to yell at dog..." So no dumbing down, quite the opposite of that...
And I wouldn't say that we were very committed to learning English (although we, at least I, were very committed _not_ to learn Swedish, just pass it..).

Ha, nice. Though if that's the mentality there too, denn es ist gleich und gleich gesellt sich gern. The question I still have is how do you guys have a better Education system, supposedly? I understand it isn't perfect, but there has to be a reason. As for his own errors, we place emphasis on nouns with the word 'the'. IE, the German Shepherd. Not trying to be mean, just eager to help.

Love the responses, keep em' coming. They are very informative.

[Tiwaz]

Think of the education this way...

First, we have reasonably small population.
Second, despite crap pay the position of teacher has(or has had) certain level of prestige in it.
Third, to be teacher you actually need to have proper studies behind you.

And finally, most kids/students are smart enough to understand soon enough that in Finland, to get anywhere you need right papers. That means, correct studies completed. (preferably with reasonable grades)

Those who do not get them, end up on low end menial jobs which often also are low paid and low prestige jobs.
So to be something, you need to put the effort to it.

[jas_rho]

As for his own errors, we place emphasis on nouns with the word 'the'. IE, the German Shepherd. Not trying to be mean, just eager to help.

Love the responses, keep em' coming. They are very informative.[/color]

So now you are trying to correct other peoples' English here? I have noticed you need to learn when to use 'then' and when to use 'than' or is that just part of your dumbing down your English to help us all understand?

PS- I still think this is a joke

[Upphew]

The question I still have is how do you guys have a better Education system, supposedly? I understand it isn't perfect, but there has to be a reason. As for his own errors, we place emphasis on nouns with the word 'the'. IE, the German Shepherd. Not trying to be mean, just eager to help.

Those were my words not her's. IIRC she made that remark in Finnish and if we are going to copulate with a punctuation mark, we should move the discussion to the Kielikoulu. Finns tend to handle English fine, but are quite eager to drop back to silence, if they think that their pronounciation or grammar isn't perfect. That is byproduct of our (or at least my generation's) education system. Now I'll leave you to make your own conclusion how to help

ps. I know my limits with languages so its not going to help at all, if I'm being told that my English is good, when I know that I sucked! I have been fully indoctrinated to "management by perkele", although I might resist the urge to strangle a stereotypical American manager.

[Lazydriver]

This is a bit long, I'll try to keep it shorter in future replies.

Think of the education this way...

First, we have reasonably small population.
Second, despite crap pay the position of teacher has(or has had) certain level of prestige in it.
Third, to be teacher you actually need to have proper studies behind you.

And finally, most kids/students are smart enough to understand soon enough that in Finland, to get anywhere you need right papers. That means, correct studies completed. (preferably with reasonable grades)

Those who do not get them, end up on low end menial jobs which often also are low paid and low prestige jobs.
So to be something, you need to put the effort to it.

Hmm, that's insightful. How do the teachers teach though? I guess that's a bit vague, so I suppose I should rephrase that: I heard that teachers there have a lot of freedom to decide how they want to teach their classes. In my county, teachers are required by the school board to teach from a pre-approved curriculum that they are required to teach from (most elective classes are excepted from this little conundrum). It's a shame teachers don't seem to get paid well over there either, but what they get paid here barely pays for a decent apartment and a few luxuries when they start-out. Not sure if your teachers have iron-tight contracts that they'd have to be a pedophile or steal money to get fired over once they are tenured (naturally, they can quit at any time).

So now you are trying to correct other peoples' English here? I have noticed you need to learn when to use 'then' and when to use 'than' or is that just part of your dumbing down your English to help us all understand?

PS- I still think this is a joke

I stopped dumbing down my posts after the first post. I did dumb it down for students who are learning English, which might've been students my own age, but I didn't dumb it down to the point of this. Here's a German Example - Mein name ist Lazydriver. Ich frage, wo in Finland kann ich finde ein bißchen Arbeit für Lingustik. Bitte sehr. Also, most people who speak English don't tend to wrap their thoughts into many parenthesizes in writing, they break up their ideas into seperate sentences.

Thanks for pointing that out though, can't believe I let myself let that little mistake slip. As one of my favorite ex-editors from Computer Gaming World said on his blog, "everyone needs an editor''. Then again, I really wish I had my camera wire fixed so I could show you people how Vegas looks like when it snowed here. Giggle at our 5 to 24cm of snow that we only had one day.

The question I still have is how do you guys have a better Education system, supposedly? I understand it isn't perfect, but there has to be a reason. As for his own errors, we place emphasis on nouns with the word 'the'. IE, the German Shepherd. Not trying to be mean, just eager to help.

Those were my words not her's. IIRC she made that remark in Finnish and if we are going to copulate with a punctuation mark, we should move the discussion to the Kielikoulu. Finns tend to handle English fine, but are quite eager to drop back to silence, if they think that their pronounciation or grammar isn't perfect. That is byproduct of our (or at least my generation's) education system. Now I'll leave you to make your own conclusion how to help

ps. I know my limits with languages so its not going to help at all, if I'm being told that my English is good, when I know that I sucked! I have been fully indoctrinated to "management by perkele", although I might resist the urge to strangle a stereotypical American manager.

Ha, you have to learn somehow. Finnish is hard because of the compounded words and the sixteen cases. But English is hard because of 64 different phonemes* crammed into 26 and confusion when it comes to synonyms. Hell, we don't even give foreign words like façade Anglicization, we just call it facade (same pronunciation as the French word) instead of fasade (like it should be, or we got rid of that stupid silent E, 'fasad').

Other then your 'its' error (A LOT OF AMERICANS DO THAT, its and it's sound the same but are two different words), your English is perfect. And you were damn spot on about a lot of American managers (ha, I like your saying: 'management by perkele'). I'd want to strangle a person like that too.

If I want to talk to a Finn in real life, I won't grammatically correct them unless they know I do it just to help them (your hän is our he/she, it's impolite to say 'it', but you know that). Hey, if a German corrected me, I wouldn't mind. Unless it was in a mean way. But hey, if I'm Finland, I should be speaking Finnish anyway! It's your country!



Hell, Americans make mistakes ALL the time. We really need spelling reforms. But back on topic, don't be afraid of sounding wrong. America loves foreigners that don't come here in droves, until of course that foreigner society has joined the "American" one and then promptly discriminates against the next batch. Like Irish-descendants to Chinese and then both of those to Mexicans. So if you're Finnish and you come to America, you'll be seen as a novelty foreigner and viewed with fascination rather then fear or hate, even if your English skills aren't perfect.

You might be mistaken for Russian if you get rid of your articles in the wrong place though (but the accent is wildly different). However, since Finns are generally highly educated, you get an express path to citizenship (takes up to fifteen years for a Mexican, but for a Finn, maybe a few years) AND you get respected. All thanks to that welfare-college system you have that gives you a leg up against a lot of Americans who have to enslave themselves to tens of thousands of dollars in loans or be really lucky and get scholarships that pay for everything by killing themselves for four years, or join the army. Then again, you have conscripted military, but you guys aren't exactly invading other countries on a regular basis since your country was founded.

The downside that when you come here there is no KELA, and hospitals will let you die if you don't have the money or insurance to pay for healthcare (which if you're an educated Finn, in a better economy, you'd have a nice job which has insurance for you, but you'd still pay the co-pay). Also if you want to go back to get more training for your job, not only do you not have the job protection like you do in Finland, but you also have to pay for more training for most professions (unless you went back to Finland and did an exchange program from there).

See, in this country, we hate taxes, so we let our money drop in value so we can spend it on blowing countries up with billion dollar bombers and forty million dollar missiles and watch our civil services fall apart and consider something as critical as healthcare to be not worthy of taxes (WHICH IS SOMETHING I'D LIKE TO HEAR YOUR OPINIONS ON!). But that's my political stance and why I find a lot of people over here retarded, I mean, does anyone pay for their firemen? Is putting out a fire for free considered socialism? Gah.

But you poor Finns! Perfection is rarely achievable (that breaks with the silent E ("achieveable" - not a word) rule of English, because "achieve" is a word. Either do it the German way, or the French way, you silly language, not both!. Your language tries to be consistent, but since English has had so many influences, it ends up becoming schizophrenic. The Lingua Franca of the World ends up becoming more confusing then Finnish could ever aspire to be. After all, just OUR letter Y ends up having three different ways of saying it!

EDIT: I put letters instead of phonemes? Ugh!

[pierrot]

I stopped dumbing down my posts after the first post. I did dumb it down for students who are learning English, which might've been students my own age, but I didn't dumb it down to the point of this. Here's a German Example - Mein name ist Lazydriver. Ich frage, wo in Finland kann ich finde ein bißchen Arbeit für Lingustik. Bitte sehr. Also, most people who speak English don't tend to wrap their thoughts into many parenthesizes in writing, they break up their ideas into seperate sentences.

Thanks for pointing that out though, can't believe I let myself let that little mistake slip.

It should have been: Mein Name ist Lazydriver. Ich frage Sie, wo bzw. wie ich in Finnland Arbeit für einen Linguisten/Sprachwissenschaftler finden kann.
But I guess you just wanted to dumb it down again for the unwashed crowd here ...

[Pursuivant]

for the unwashed crowd here

Ach Pierrot, du muß in die Sauna gehen. Ich glaube doch also daß "Sprachnixwissenschaftler" also war falsch geschrieben, aber das ist gut ein Junge hat die Mischung ganz brisant... für mich fußall, ficken und alkohol ist genug.

[Pursuivant]

I heard that teachers there have a lot of freedom to decide how they want to teach their classes. In my county, teachers are required by the school board to teach from a pre-approved curriculum that they are required to teach from

Theres the core corriculum that everyone needs to "pass" - how exactly you pass it is up to the schools say in which sries of books they use etc. say in high school the teachers use some books but moe press with the high school matriculation test questions and university entrance questions...

Finnish is hard because of the compounded words and the sixteen cases. But English is hard because of 64 different letters crammed into 26 and confusion when it comes to synonyms.

Well thets nothing to the French (or the Portugese for that matter) that spend letters like they grew in trees and then say just half of them. Like they write "eau" and say "ö". If a Finn wants to say "ö" he writes "ö". not eeee aaaa uuuu which is three letters - all wasted. Preserve water.

So if you're Finnish and you come to America, you'll be seen as a novelty foreigner

Why's that, the First Finns came over in 1639... one "Peter Rambo" for example.... history of asskicker names.

something as critical as healthcare to be not worthy of taxes

Well we don't have exactly "socialized medicine" like in Canada either. It more of a combined system. Like you can go get a heart attack and wait in the bypass line for 10 months or flick 10K on the table and have the same surgeon operate you in the same theatre you have a "public time" for in the 10 months.

and why I find a lot of people over here retarded

Well that explains really why people in America don't believe in evolution - they don't witness any advancement in their species, rather devolution.

But you poor Finns!

Yeah, and we just got nuked in South Park too... was Kenny in for a visit?

[EP]

the job protection like you do in Finland

Every day hundreds of people lose their jobs, and not voluntarily.

I still think that high school exhange year is best for you. You could take an after school McD job at home and save your salary if your parents are unable to help you financially. Also Rotaries could very well have some kind of stipend system. And in Finland you would live in a family, so you would not starve either.

[enk]

Pierrot, you might want to change the professional titles you supplied Lazydriver with in that corrected German, because any
linguist worth their salt would know that this is a crock:

[But English is hard because of 64 different letters crammed into 26 and confusion when it comes to synonyms.

The English language only has 26 letters, not 64 no matter how you look at it.

-enk

[easily-lost]

Seeing is believing. When you actually arrived here and tested yourself in the job market after 3 months, you would be able to draw a more clear conclusion by then. First of all, to be a linguist, you need to know what a "linguist" is first. Here are two simple definitions:

1. A person who speaks several languages fluently.
2. A specialist in linguistics.

Which one do you think fits you?