This reminds the Tundra Tabloids of the scene from the movie based on Aleksis Kivi’s book “Seitsemän Veljestä or Seven Brothers”. Learning Finnish is difficult enough, but near impossible if left to learning it all on your own. You need to interact with society, and a growing number of foreigners in Finland are refusing to do even that. KGS
NOTE: The scene is of the village vicar trying to teach these seven brothers their ABC’s, …in vain.
A small but increasing number of Finnish-born children are entering school with no knowledge of either Finnish or Swedish. In Helsinki, for example, around ten first-graders come to class each year speaking only a foreign language.
Schools have “preparatory courses” in place to help immigrant students learn enough Finnish or Swedish to join regular classes. But these were set up for older kids. Until recently, there hasn’t been a need to educate Finnish-born toddlers.
“At home, they speak their own native language and the parents don’t know Finnish. And if the children don’t go to day care, they haven’t really heard Finnish anywhere,” says Sandra Casals, who teaches preparatory classes in Helsinki. “These children have such a poor grasp of Finnish that they can’t enter the mainstream classes.”
Room is being made for these children in prep classes, but some educators say that it would be far easier if the children were exposed to either Finnish or Swedish at a much younger age.
“A seven-year-old is past the age of language-learning sensitivity,” says Helsinki city’s education director Marjo Kyllönen. “Children learn best at around two years of age. This is why it’s important to find ways to expose the child even younger so they can start school in a normal class with others their own age.”