could be there for 2 years or forever. don't really have a long term plan and that's fine. right now I'm just enjoying the possibilities.

I figure this is something I wanna do at some point in my life no matter what: living there, getting fluent in Finnish and just kinda absorbing Finland for a while, since both countries will always be part of our lives regardless. right now happens to be a really good time to give it a try, for a number of personal and political reasons.

lazily trying to learn Finnish is going ok! my vocabulary is growing all the time. the more words I learn, the easier it is to pick up new ones, I think because 1: familiarity makes them easier to differentiate (it doesn't just look like letter salad anymore), and 2: related words are more likely to be similar than in English, e.g. kirja/kirje/kirjasto/kirjoittaa (book/letter/library/write).

really need an actual class to tie it all together, but I think I've given myself a good head start!

I've reached a kinda frustrating stage where I still can't skim Finnish text and instantly get much out of it — once in a while I can puzzle out a whole sentence if I stare at it long enough, poring over cases and consonant gradation and stuff — but my brain feels like it *should* be able to.

it kinda feels like trying to read at 4am, when your eyes keep sliding off the page, and you read the same paragraph 5 times and still have no idea what it said