Finnish things


When I was a kid I didn’t really have a real dream job to be honest. All I knew was that speaking English was one of my strengths and I wanted to use it. I played a lot of video games in elementary school and used English pretty much daily by doing so. We all use English daily in some form. We see ads, we hear music, we surf the internet every day. Our minds start to connect words to pictures and even kids will learn more easily than what it was like 50 years ago.

Nowadays it’s more likely to a person to answer you if you ask them something in English here in Finland. Still many people are afraid to use English. Even in Finnish we don’t small talk. I saw VisitFinland writing about our lovely nation perfectly on their website. This is what they wrote:
“Finns are not big small talkers, and quiet moments in conversations are not considered awkward. Silence merely means the person doesn’t have anything essential to say. There’s no necessity to fill gaps in conversation with chatter. On the other hand, Finns are genuine – we mean what we say. “Let’s have a beer sometime” actually means you will be contacting the other person sooner or later for a drink, and they will be expecting it”. (VisitFinland 2018)

I’ve heard from many foreigners that the conversations with Finns are really peaceful. The gaps in the conversation doesn’t matter when there’s a Finn involved. I can agree with them. I like to slow the conversations down when I’m speaking with someone, not because I’d want to be rude or anything. It’s just a Finnish thing I guess…

I’ve been travelling a lot and met people from all around the world since I was a kid. A year ago, I got a chance to study in the School of Business and services Proakatemia. There I’ve got a chance to continue meeting new people. The school has also opened a lot of doors for me and one of them was being assigned as Head of International Relations of Proakatemia. Now I meet people from all over the world almost on a weekly basis. I’ve even got to travel abroad a couple of times to work on projects.

One of the great things in life is that there are people from different cultures pretty much anywhere you go. It’s a richness that teaches us way more than any books.

Best regards,
Joonatan Halonen




Sources:
https://www.visitfinland.com/article/what-are-the-finns-like/

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