It happened after my ex-boyfriend moved out and I asked myself where is my life heading now. I thought about a lot of things to do - changing jobs, go on a Europe-wide trek on foot or by hitchhiking, move back to Hungary, jump in the Thames... I was also free to do things i didn't do while my boyfriend was around and could criticize and mock my quirkiness. I started watching movies and to knit while standing up and doing little leg-exercises, bought food he didn't tolerated like salami, and dug out my meager collection of snowboard movies. Which are either full with finnish guys or are made (partially) in Finland or both.
I've always had a soft spot for Finland and everything finnish. Being Hungarian, i knew from a very young age that the only country where they speak a language even remotely similar to Hungarian is Finland*. I also loved the fact that they had beautiful forests and beautiful architecture, and the men are blue eyed and blond haired (which are relatively rare in Hungary so i always found them exotic ;) I ended up studying Swedish and Estonian at the university, then came to the UK to learn English - maybe i will write a post about these detours in the future. So this summer I asked myself what are the things I really want to do in my life, and staying here wasn't one of them. Going there, getting to know the country, learning or at least trying to learn the language was. That settled it. I bought a textbook and started to gather learning material on the internet, and started studying a month ago.
I haven't studied a language from the start in a long time and now remembered how hard it is. The one year of Estonian studies are helpful sometimes and a burden at others, both owing to the similarities between the two languages, since they are much closer to each other then either of them are to Hungarian, I'd say like English and German to Persian. It is also one of those languages which make me laugh all the time because they just sound funny for the unfamiliar ears, like Chinese, Swedish and English**. I also love the fact that it has a lot of words who mean something entirely different on another language, i think they are called homonyms.
These few I gathered today:
hinta - fin price, hun swing (the playground toy)
lanka - fin yarn, hun gentle slope
ovi - fin door, hun kindergarten, nursery
te - fin you (2nd person plural), hun you (2nd person singular) - Hey, we are relatives after all! :)
on - is (to be, 3rd person singular)
helmet - pearls
So, here's for me doing something crazy and too big and completely non-sense again.
Hyvaa ilta! (Good night!)
*At that time, Estonia was part of the Soviet Union and not an independent country so nobody talked about them.
** Yes, English. I remember i found it sounding ridiculous when i started
to learn it at age 9 and dropped it because i felt too embarrassed to
say all those funny words out loud in front of other people.