Learning the language in 1 year

[inakiyauck]

Hi! I'm a 15 years old kid from Argentina and I'll be going to Finland for 1 year as an exchange student and I was wondering if I could achieve a decent amount of fluency in the language. I am going to immerse myself in the language (I'll only speak and read in Finnish, etc)
So, what do you guys think? Will I be able to achieve my goals with a bit of sisu?

[Rip]

Do you think you're talented in foreign languages? I guess it might happen, especially if you truly try to stick to this.

(I'll only speak and read in Finnish, etc)

(surrounded by people who'd happy to speak English with you...)

The great majority of people here speak after one year Finnish something between 'poorly' and 'next to nothing'

[inakiyauck]

Do you think you're talented in foreign languages? I guess it might happen, especially if you truly try to stick to this.

(I'll only speak and read in Finnish, etc)

(surrounded by people who'd happy to speak English with you...)

The great majority of people here speak after one year Finnish something between 'poorly' and 'next to nothing'

Thank you for answering.
Apart from English and Spanish I speak a good deal of French and I'll take German lessons thos
year.
I'm not a prodigy but I really like studying languages.

[Jukka Aho]

Hi! I'm a 15 years old kid from Argentina and I'll be going to Finland for 1 year as an exchange student and I was wondering if I could achieve a decent amount of fluency in the language. I am going to immerse myself in the language (I'll only speak and read in Finnish, etc)
So, what do you guys think? Will I be able to achieve my goals with a bit of sisu?

Back in lukio, there was this exchange student from Brazil in my class who pulled off exactly that. He arrived soon after Christmas and was only talking English for most of the spring semester. Near the onset of the summer holidays, however, he decided no-one’s going to talk anything but Finnish to him any longer.

He spent the holidays with his Finnish friends. When I saw him again — at the beginning of the fall semester — I was surprised to find he was talking in conversational, informal Finnish almost like a native. He had gaps in his vocabulary, of course, and problems with the most complex sentences, but he was really good at basic conversational language and also with inflecting words and other such things where you might easily catch a non-native speaker. He didn’t have a noticeable accent, either, which probably helped masking some of the problems he might have had. Apparently he was a good listener and imitator. Or maybe his native tongue — which was not Portuguese but some other local language spoken in the area where he was from — was close enough to Finnish in that department.

He liked to sing along to many Finnish songs: mainly popular music; hits played on the radio. That might have helped him get the language gears and cogs sorted out in his head — or at least the accent right. Check out this thread for some samples if you’d like to look into that exercise method. (Lyrics are available all over the web and you can also find translations on Lyricstranslate.com and Lirama.net.)

[inakiyauck]

Thank you all for answering. Now I'll start reading newspapers and listening to music in Finnish.
I'm going to watch children's shows too to obtain some vocabulary.

[Pursuivant]

Very good idea. You are lucky in that Finnish and Spanish "go the same way" as in a = a and e=e so you do not have to deprogram much of your brain like you need for other languages. What you have to deprogram is rythm, intonation and ll and j and learn to say h with a certain aspiration... You want to speak like a robot - no funny, the way Finns know someone is a foreigner is they speak too fast and have intonation. Finnish is a rythm ta ta ta ta . Actually, there is a robot that might help you pronounce words. http://www.mikropuhe.com/live/

Try type in Illalla jollain sillalla hoilasin jotain jollekkin. ...see now the difference... as I said its easy for Spanish...type in this ke paasa, mi amiigo, kiere mira los peliikkulas vinlandeessas? ...horrid accent, but you can get a Spanish synthesizer to speak "Finnish".

[Jukka Aho]

Thank you all for answering. Now I'll start reading newspapers

There’s this news aggregator service called Ampparit.com. It provides recent headlines and links to news stories from all the largest Finnish papers and magazines — except Helsingin Sanomat, which recently established a paywall which only allows you to read a handful of articles per week without paying.

(You can still enable HS.fi headlines by creating a custom profile on Ampparit.com. You can also drill down to different categories of content by using the links on the sidebar, or create a custom profile which will automatically exclude some content based on its category or publisher. For example, if you want to get all headlines related to politics and science but exclude articles related to sports and entertainment it is possible to create a personalized profile which will filter things that way.)

You might also want to take a look at Lehtiluukku.com, which hosts a number of free magazines and local papers you can browse on your screen free of charge. This service also has content you need to pay for, but the magazines marked with the blue Lue ilmaiseksi banner are freebies. See Teknari as well.

[inakiyauck]

Thanks! I'll check them out!