Sarkku's Sharebook 

The question in this group - if I understood right how to join a group or take part - was how many languages one speaks and if one studies one now, then why. My native toung is Finnish which is not spoken by that many people, perhaps some 5 million, so we all in Finland study languages at school. Most start with English on the third grade at the age of nine, but not all (some start with Friench, German, Swedish, Russian..)... On the 7th grade the Finns start studying Swedish which is another official language in Finland, spoken by 6% of the Finns - and of course by the Swedes, our best loved "enemies", neighbours.

I speak Finnish and English and Swedish. I have worked in Estonia for 5 months a bit over 10 years ago and speak a bit of that languages, too, as I learned it while I lived there and studied for a year after coming back to Finland. It is a close relative to Finnish but also because of that there are many same words that mean very different things. For example "piim" is Estonian and means "milk" in English, but a word "piimä" in Finnish means "sour milk" in English and "milk" in Finnish is "maito". "Sour milk" is in Estonian "hapu piim" ("happu? piim" - I'm not sure about the writing as the rules for pronunciation are different in Finnish and Estonian..).

At school I studied also German but I have never really used that language so I cannot say I speak it. German is a relative language to Swedish so I do understand a bit of German too. Now I study italian for third year. I like to sing and at least in opera Italian is a big language. I have also got interested in "gatto di Ceylon"(Ceylon cat) who mostly live in Italy if i have got it right. That breed is not acknowleged as a breed in Finlad. So just to get to know more about this so called breed it would be handy to know italian... Travelling is nice too and Italy a great country to get to know..

How many languages did I name? I must count now: Finnish (one), English (two), Swedish (three), Estonian (four), a bit of German (four and a half), a little Italian (five). In Finland we are not counting our native toung in "how many languages do you speak or know so I guess my answer is two more properly and two some, all in all almost four languages. Languages are handy for getting to know more people more proper and also to get a sight to a different culture as a language also gives a knew way into thinking...
Good night!

Sarkku