Inuktitut

Mitä olen oppinut Suomessa … what I learn in Finland

/ Jane George / 3 Comments

I’m in Finland for two weeks, from May 31 to June 13.

And it’s not my first time in this Arctic country, located around the top of the world from northern Canada: when I was young I lived there and learned the language, which I talked about in an earlier “date.”

But here’s what I have learned so far during this trip — which I didn’t really expect to learn:

After years working as a broadcaster and journalist, I finally understand something I’ve been told, retold and then retold to others — that if you are writing a story about an issue, make it a story about people.

How do I finally really understand why this is so important?

Well, my reading skills in Finnish are at about a Grade Six level, so suddenly I’m in the situation of a person with low literacy.

But when I’m in Finland, I still try to practice reading.

A selection of magazines that can be borrowed from a library in Finland. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

A selection of magazines that can be borrowed from a library in Finland. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Here’s the kind of stories I read at first:

• a 22-year-old Finnish man is killed in Goa, India under mysterious circumstances;

• a couple’s premature baby struggles to survive;

• a woman who is overweight becomes a chaplain and then discovers she’s gay;

• Finnish celebrities, whose names mean nothing to me, talk about their divorces, affairs, tattoos, etc.; and,

• people who own and renovate a typical Finnish “mökki” or cottage show what they did.

Why do I read these? Because people-oriented stories are easier to read and far more interesting than others.

As my reading skills improve, I start to read stories about politics (Russia’s close presence makes Finns very nervous) and climate change (a journalist from the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper goes to California, where he finds a Finnish woman who talks about the state’s water crisis.)

If you want to buy Karelian patties, here's the place: but it still helps to know what the Finnish says. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

If you want to buy Karelian patties, here’s the place: but it still helps to know what the Finnish says. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

In the Nunatsiaq News, people stories also prove to be more popular — for readers, whose first language is often not English.

But we also have to encourage people to improve their reading skills, like me, so they’ll dare to read a story about something else, such as climate change, or even international politics.

Here’s what else I learn:

My brain keeps a lot of Finnish somewhere on its back-burner — but using the language and immersing myself in it is the key to bringing this out.

When I get on the airplane to go to Helsinki, I hear people speaking Finnish and the language sounds so strange, like Klingon almost… and yet, somehow, I understand it. But can I speak it after a year?

I don’t even ask the flight attendants for drinks in Finnish.

On Day One, I wish I’d brought a Finnish-English dictionary along as I stumble over the simplest explanations; by Day Two, I am able to baby-talk Finnish.

Someone asks me for directions on Day Three and I can answer. although I don’t know where they should go.

It's easy to stay up late when the sun doesn't set. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

It’s easy to stay up late when the sun doesn’t set. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

By Day Four I stay up with friends, until the sun is almost at the horizon (and ready to rise again.) I’m talking and making jokes in Finnish, with half-remembered  verbs somehow appearing again — verbs like cut down, suggest, disappear or suffer.

I also relearn, among many other words, the following: dandelion, rainbow, otter, design, crow, insurance, wheelbarrow and pine cone.

On Day Five I still look for right endings when faced with saying things like “in the house of my friend’s brother”  — ystäväni veljen talossa. Television, where everyone speaks fast, starts to make more sense, and I start to read magazine and newspapers more easily.

I talk to myself in Finnish sometimes and random words pop into my brain. Finnish now longer feels strange but more like the rushing water of a brook that I usually think about when I’m listening to Finnish or speaking it.

I wish I had more than two weeks here — what would that do for my language skills? I wish I had that same fluency in Inuktitut, which I’ve spent more than 20 years trying to learn. And I wish there were easy-to-read celebrity magazines in Inuktitut and more things that I would want to read — in Roman orthography.

Mint, lime, cucumber drink is a find from a Finnish magazine. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORE)

Mint, lime, cucumber drink is a find from a Finnish magazine. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

My best find from a Finnish magazine: a recipe for a cucumber-lime-mint drink.

Here’s how to make it:

Cut up four limes into circles and mash them in a bowl.

Add a bunch of fresh mint and continue to mash it up.

Press out the juice through a sieve. Put the juice in with a chopped up cucumber (English) into a blender.

The result is very green.

Kippis (cheers)

Language learning: not hard at all

/ Jane George / Leave a comment

Most babies can learn to speak a language or languages without even trying  — and so can older children, too, as I saw when I started to absorb, then speak, Finnish.

But my success in learning Inuktitut later, as an adult, was less successful.

Jocelyn Barrett, Sylvia Cloutier and Siu-Ling Han participate in an exercise during the 1999 Intermediate Inuktitut class at Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit, which involves "shooting" the right person, according to the command in Inuktitut. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Jocelyn Barrett, Sylvia Cloutier and Siu-Ling Han participate in an exercise during the 1999 Intermediate Inuktitut class at Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit, which involves “shooting” the right person, according to the command in Inuktitut. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Why? For one thing, I was never immersed totally in the language outside my Nunavut Arctic College courses. In Iqaluit there are many English- and French-speakers, and even when in more unilingual communities, there was always the presence of another language somewhere in the background — on television or the internet.

Had I been able to visit an outpost camp and hear no English for a few months, I believe my mastery of Inuktitut could have quickly improved — but that was hard to do with job and family.

On the other hand, although my mainly school-learned French was imperfect,  I quickly became fluent when I worked in a unilingual French-language office as a young adult in Quebec. Perhaps if Nunavut or Nunavik had Inuktitut-only work environments, people would get better at speaking Inuktitut more quickly.

And if all Inuktitut dialects in Canada used Roman orthography for writing,  it might be easier to learn and use the language without mastering an entirely new alphabet. Even now, I can read and understand more of something written in Greenlandic or Inuinnaqtun than in syllabics, which require an additional level of effort to understand.

Based on my experiences, here’s what I think the list of ingredients for language-learning — which could be applied to Inuktitut teaching (or as it’s now called by the Government of Nunavut ,”Inuktut”) — include, namely to:

• start language-learning early when the brain is more open to learning language(s) in schools and child care centres (as is the rule in Nunavik child care centres) and at home;

• provide immersion in the language, at home and in the community, if possible;

• make the language worth learning — that’s because if there’s a need to speak, then you’ll want to learn it;

• draw on the language skills of unilingual elders;

• put the language into situations like social activities, sewing or hunting or whatever —because  it’s much easier to remember that way;

• adopt Roman orthography ASAP;

• put less emphasis on dialects and work on basic communication skills; and,

• foster more publishing of books, magazines and other reading materials.

None of these ideas are new. In fact, the above list reads like the to-do lists of many language specialists in Nunavut and Nunavik.

But although these are commonsense, already-accepted ideas, many have gone nowhere in Canada’s North or moved too slowly to have an impact.

Money isn’t the only issue, either: it’s will — if you just talk to your children in a language, they will learn.

Look for future A date with Siku girl posts on Arctic talk, travel, thoughts and news.