TAT-team has been interviewing people who have participated in our activities, especially Finnish Language Discussion Group participants!

MAX HYUN

Max has lived in Finland for about four years. Previously he lived in Jämsä, and this April it had been a year since he moved to Helsinki. The first time Max came to Finland was because of a friend’s recommendation in 2011. The cool Finnish summer was a point of attraction and Max would go around the capital videoing sights and other enjoyable places. You could catch these videos on TV in South Korea. Recently Max began translating these old videos of his into Finnish. (https://youtu.be/PTUjCcEVrOI?si=6Ahi_Vf8C48w2ANY )

Max is studying at Taitotalo, which includes a current internship at a café. Max wishes to work as a practical nurse or a care assistant and with that in mind he is going to start his studies at Diaconia University of Applied Sciences. Max wants to contribute to Finnish society. He has for a long time striven to understand issues related to mental health and working with marginalised and underprivileged people is a long term passion of his. He sees that this way he can help create a happy tomorrow. In his personal future Max wishes to see more friends, do more yoga and play the piano. His first priorities, the things he recognizes he needs to focus on for now are working and learning Finnish, still trying to maintain his hobbies so that he can also express himself. 

Max has his own techniques for studying Finnish, one of them being that he attempts to learn 30 new words each week and then make use of them in sentences. In order to better remember the things he has learned he periodically looks back on the past few months to review what he has been learning. Max started practising Finnish in 2013 and he joined us at TAT last September (2023). He describes the TAT community as incredibly useful, being especially pleased to be able to get along with other foreigners, as well as share useful tips. The language group is also helping him to integrate into Finland. On top of it all Max thinks that the group gives him valuable metacognitive insight into his own skills: he can more objectively see what he knows and what he does not. 

Interview written by Soul Koskimaa.

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THU HUYNH

Thu Huynh is someone who lives for education. Now completing a Master’s degree in education entrepreneurship she has lived in Finland for almost eight years. She came here in 2016 from Vietnam. During her first year here she studied to get the recognition of prior learning for the four-year degree in kindergarten teaching she already had. Simultaneously Thu also studied the added qualification of early childhood education. 

Thu feels extremely lucky to have had the possibility to add this to her qualifications because the requirements are strict for being able to educate young children. Thu gets to work with six-year-olds and says she loves working with kids that age because they challenge you by asking about things you yourself would not think to question. 

For her first year in Finland Thu did not have an interest in learning Finnish and she took her first Finnish course only after she started working. Curious about the YKI Language Proficiency test she took it and passed on her first attempt. In general, Thu likes exposing herself to languages and has done that with many: Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Japanese and English. Like still, with Finnish she found listening to be the hardest part but having put her mind to it she now says it is difficult but not impossible. She believes that if she would have been studying Finnish with this much effort and resolve for all these years she would now be at the high proficiency level of C. 

Thu has worked here for seven years and recently, after some years of not studying Finnish she found the motivation to pick it up again; wanting to challenge herself more at work. This for her meant moving to a Finnish-speaking work environment. Having worked in the same place for years she was looking to step outside of her comfort zone. She wanted to learn Finnish so that she would not have to just keep saying ‘puhun vähän suomea’ (‘I speak Finnish a little bit’). She joined us at TAT in 2023. 

Thu attends, from time to time, both the language cafe on Thursday that welcomes Finnish speakers of all levels as well as the Monday class online meant for B1-level and up. On top of both studying and working, Thu still sees the huge benefit of coming to these language groups. In addition to attendance being free, what makes TAT groups special in her opinion is how she feels that the instructors of the groups possess not just the pedagogical skills but also the ability to create that much-wanted connection between student and teacher. 

What Thu sees as an essential part of studying a language is self-reflection and she thinks that without it a lot of people unfortunately do not recognize their improvement. Believing that sharing empowers learning, Thu likes to meet new people and be of help in their language learning as well as overall integration to Finland. With her own learning, Thu pays special attention to tracking her progress, and she is really able to see how far she has come. Sometimes Thu starts thinking whether she has the energy and motivation for the language but despite that she wants to keep trying and although it is demanding she still describes it as being fun and interesting. 

Interview written by Soul Koskimaa.

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