All the time something interesting is
happening in this house, there is not a single weekend without an
incident. Last night we had a thief coming over. He left took
laptops, passports and in addition some random stuff like our kettle,
garbage bags and detergent liquid in a handy spray bottle. Apparently
the thief lives in a messy household and decided to fix the problem
not by going to Coles and buyng cleaning equipment but coming to the
closest hostel and leaving with everything that he was able to
conveniently carry with him. The incident is being investigated and
the house is full of private detectives.
I have a long list of posts I wanted to
write and today's topic is studying languages. As I have mentioned
before, in Finland it's mandatory to study at least 2 languages and
even the ones that hated Swedish at school are usually well able to
say ”jag är 16 år gammal” even though they have aged quite a
lot since those days.
In Australia I decided to study some
new, exotic language that is not offered by language schools in
Finland. I chose Vietnamese because Vietnam interests me as a country
and as a culture. If I could choose my field of study without
thinking about finding employment and earning money I would study
historical comparative linguistics, specializing on Asiatic languages
such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese etc and how they still
reflect the cultural, political and commercial ties between the
nations. But let's put that aside now. When I started the course I
noticed that the automatic assumption was that people participating
in the course either have Vietnamese background or a Vietnamese
spouse. I think I am the only odd one out. Duh, what's the point of
studying the native language of a guy who is surely only going to
stay in my life for a month or so (sorry, the compulsory cynical
insert!) I guess I am the only one who wants to study languages
because of the joy of being able to communicate in another language,
to see the world in a slightly different light.
When I told people I want to start
studying Vietnamese, I often heard the pessimistic comment that it's
not going to benefit me in any way to know some Vietnamese. What do
you mean by that? I want to go to Vietnam for my holidays and it's
going to make my life a bit easier if I can at least read the menu by
myself. And secondly, how do I know what's going to happen in the
future? Anything is possible. When I still lived at home and ironed
our family's laundry because my mother hates ironing I never thought
it's going to benefit me in any way to know how to iron well. Yet
here I am, working in a laundry service and ironing loads and loads
of laundry every day. Besides, why should everything we do actually
financially benefit us? Learning something new has a mental benefit.
It makes me happy, positive and increases my confidence. Hey, I can
do this, I can read and speak Vietnamese! Plus, have you ever noticed
how happy people usually become when you try to utter even a simple sentence in their language? At least I feel happy if someone says
”kiitos” to me instead of thank you. It's a way of showing
appreciation. I think learning a language widens the world view and
helps to build understanding. Let's learn more languages! I want to
learn Hebrew, Hindi, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian and many, many other
languages. Just for fun. And learning languages gets easier the more
you do it because you have a wider basic knowledge to rely on.
PS. My eye looks almost normal now!
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