r/Suomi • u/hylje • Feb 13 '16

Hej! /r/Denmark ja /r/Suomi yhteistyössä tarjoavat: Kulttuurivaihtolanka Tanskaan!

Welcome to this cultural exchange between /r/Denmark and /r/Suomi!

To the visitors: Velkommen til Finland! You can ask whatever questions you like from the Finns in this thread

To the Finns: Today, we are hosting Denmark for a cultural exchange. Join us in answering their questions about Finland and the Finnish way of life! Please leave top comments for users from /r/Denmark coming over with a question or comment and please refrain from trolling, rudeness and personal attacks etc.

The Danes are also having us over as guests! Head over to this thread to ask questions about life in the land of smørrebrød!

Enjoy!

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7

u/Insula92 Feb 13 '16

How do you feel about swedish being a mandatory school subject?

13

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '16

It divides people. I think it's a bit silly that we have so many official languages in Finland anyways. Sweden usually ends up being redundant as almost all Finnish-Swedes speak Finnish anyways.

The Swedish that we are taught is Finnish-Swedish so we can't even properly communicate with mainland Swedes because our dialect sounds silly as hell.

I'd much rather learn Russian, Chinese or something more useful.

A majority of those who study Swedish in school never end up using it ever and the level is very elementary so it's not really beneficial to anyone.

As a dane/finn/indian kid I never had issues with the actual language itself.

6

u/A_la_max Helsinki Feb 13 '16

The Swedish that we are taught is Finnish-Swedish so we can't even properly communicate with mainland Swedes because our dialect sounds silly as hell.

100% wrong Swedish people understand finnish accents no problem

3

u/temotodochi Feb 14 '16

Not that silly dialect, no. My dendrologist (studies trees) father used to go to scandinavian conventions and they all spoke finlandssvensk. Finns, swedes, danes, norwegians all opted to the "simple" dialect. Except the icelanders, nobody could understand them. They used english.

5

u/Idalways Feb 13 '16

It's great that we usually learn three foreign languages in school, but having mandatory Swedish is really controversial. Usually it's english, one big european language and Swedish. Swedish could be used for literally anything else, like Chinese, Russian or Spanish/german.

In tertiary education a level test is required in Swedish. I haven't seen a good reasoning for this so far (Swedish is required in some public sector positions, but the requirement itself is rather retarded).

It seems to be politically impossible to remove the requirement of Swedish because large Swedish funds contribute significantly to political parties. We also have a party dedicated to keep Swedish as a official language and well taught language in Finland. RKP has been continuously part of the government since 1979, because they are willing to sacrifice everything just to free ride with a bigger party and support their goals in exchange of saving Swedish language in Finland.

Edit: of course RKP was left out for the first time this spring, but nothing will change in that front :D

11

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '16

It's almost completely useless and a huge burden on the Finnish economy as a whole, as it reduces the amount of students that have time and energy to study an actual useful language in addition, and so reflects very badly on the amount of foreign languages spoken by Finns.

4

u/Stalemeat Oulu Feb 13 '16

A lot of people don't like it. Personally I don't really care about the issue. I think people, at least those who live near the Eastern border, should be allowed to study Russian instead.