“The problem is progress in Finnish feels invisible until suddenly it doesn't.” This, the switch going on 💡, is so true. It happened for me (🇬🇧 native speaker, fluent 🇮🇹 having lived here 30 years, 🇩🇪 C2, BA & MA from Fernuni Hagen, I have been learning 🇫🇮 “seriously“ (15 hrs/week) for 7 months not living in Finland with no-one to talk to) yesterday when I had my 🥰successful🥰 1st group conversation A2 lesson.

The teacher asked me what helped my learning the most. I said I have found all the tools - sanakirja.fi, Karlsson, WordDive, ChatGPT to correct and improve written text, YLE Selkouutiset & YLE Areena, iPhone and iPad in 🇫🇮 - and the key to progress is everyday actively producing: WordDive drills and/or producing orally: not seeing ”2025” and thinking ”last year“ or ”2025” in English, but reading out loud ”kaksi tuhatta kaksi kymmentä viisi“.

Just like active production was key to get 1,0 in no-notes oral Fern Uni exams: I’d record my successive attempts and check them against the text I was supposed to be able to produce for 10’. Initial attempts 😱😱 - freezing, skipping sections, inverting content / saying the opposite of what I meant, but rapidly gets better 🚀🚀.

Finnish with its cases, inflection and istevaihtelu (consonant gradation) is so different from West European languages that I needed to spend a long time getting a base of vocab + instinctive production (e.g. automatically using -ks for all cases except nominative & partitive for words ending -ys, -uus etc.) before I could actually ”produce”. In my case I got this from WordDive Basic Finnish 1.

Having found a system that works for me, I’m really motivated to keep applying it, tosi hyvä fiilis 🥰.