There are a lot of misconceptions around language learning – and unfortunately some of them are so ingrained that we rarely even question them.
It’s so easy to just accept them as facts and build our entire learning strategy around them, even when they’re not actually helping us make progress.
In this article, I want to focus on six myths that I find are the most detrimental for any language learner – so you can stop believing them and finally get closer to actually understanding and speaking Finnish. Let’s go!
I have to start with the myth that annoys me the most, which is that you have to learn grammar rules in order to speak a foreign language.
According to scientific research, learning grammar rules only helps marginally when it comes to understanding and speaking a language.
In other words, even if you know the Finnish grammar by heart, you will not be able to understand or speak it fluently.
Instead, our brains acquire language the same way they always have – by making sense of messages we hear or read, absorbing patterns and structures without ever consciously studying them.
To become fluent in Finnish, it’s therefore much more useful to focus first on listening to and reading Finnish, which will naturally help you learn the structure of the language – i.e. the grammar – and then on practising speaking.
This is probably a surprising one. Why would you skip the beginner level stuff when starting a new language?
Well, because some of those “beginner” things are not actually beginner-friendly at all. Things like conjugating the verb to be, prepositions or cases, conjunctions, and other abstract grammatical connectors are acquired much later when you use the natural method.
A good example of this is that children learning their native language start using those things only once they’ve been speaking 1–2-word sentences for a while (Source: Dreaming Spanish).
Another issue I have with beginner topics is that some of them are just very boring.
If you don’t like shopping (I don’t 🙌), learning how to ask for a bigger size of that green t-shirt will be useless and not interesting for you.
Now that I’m learning Dutch from scratch, I have a selection of videos about different topics and I can choose to listen to things that I enjoy – and I don’t have to struggle with things like furniture vocabulary.
Ok I admit: children have an advantage in language learning. But it’s not exactly what you think.
I’ve seen studies both in favour and against (I’d have to do a deeper dive to give a fully informed conclusion) children learning languages more easily.
My take on this is that because of the neuroplasticity of children’s brains (think of this as how flexible your brain is), they can probably form the neural pathways required for language learning more effortlessly than adult learners.
People often wonder how children learn so quickly, whilst adults have to spend many years in language lessons and still can’t hold a normal conversation.
But children, even when learning a second or third language, often spend a lot of their waking time acquiring the language: listening to their parents, watching cartoons, singing songs or playing in that language – which is a completely different approach to the way adults usually learn languages: through grammar. And as I explained in myth number one, this simply isn’t the most effective way to learn to speak a foreign language.
This means that children get much more exposure to the language than adult learners normally do, which of course makes them learn “faster”.
The one thing that children really ace at is pronunciation. After around the age of 12, it is very difficult to get rid of one’s native accent in a foreign language.
I can’t tell you how many times I've heard these two things:
“You can’t learn Finnish without living there.”
“I’ve lived in Finland for 10+ years and I still don’t speak it.”
See what I mean?
Just living in Finland won’t make you speak Finnish. If you live in an expat bubble and use English with locals, you can live there your whole life and never be fluent in Finnish.
And you can definitely learn a language without ever even visiting or living there – in the age of internet anything is possible!
When I was learning Italian, I listened to Italian YouTube videos every single day (using my method of course, not just listening without understanding). Once I could understand it without subtitles, I listened to Italian podcasts whenever I was in the bus or walking.
This is to show that in language learning, what you do is more important than where you live.
If you feel bad about being able to understand even complex conversations in Finnish but only forming very basic sentences – don’t. This is very normal.
When you’re learning a new language, your understanding is (and should be) always at a higher level than your speaking. That’s because you need to understand those things first, before you can practise saying them yourself.
And let me tell you a secret: even native speakers don’t speak as well as they understand!
For example, I have a very broad passive vocabulary in Finnish. I’ve always read a lot of books, which broadens your vocabulary in any language.
However, when I speak Finnish, I only use a small fraction of that vocabulary. This is because in everyday life, it’s much more natural and faster to say something like “konsertti oli aivan mahtava” than “konsertti oli aivan suurenmoinen” (the concert was truly amazing).
If you want your speaking to approach your level of understanding, you can of course practise it – Finnish Me: Speak is a great tool for that!
This is a tricky one because if you study Finnish 8 hours a day every day, I believe you can be close to fluent in 6 months.
But – there’s a huge but: who has the time or energy to study that much every single day? Most of us have a job, family and other life commitments like sleeping 😴
So I’d be cautious with any apps or courses that promise you fluency from zero in just a few months – either they expect you to make Finnish your full-time job or they’re lying.
It’s very hard to give a general estimate of how long it takes to learn a language. So many things influence that: your native language, how you study, how much you study per day/week, how stressful your life is…
For my beginner & intermediate course Finnish Me, I say that you can go through the course, i.e. understand all the videos without subtitles, in about 9-12 months.
But this is an average. I have students who have gone through it in a shorter time, and others who still listen to the videos after 2 years.
My other course Finnish Me: Speak gives you a 6-month access, which is a comfortable amount of time to activate your speaking.
Note here that it’s not promising “from zero to fluency in 6 months”: this course is meant for intermediate learners who already understand at least slow Finnish.
Looking back at all these myths, they seem to have one thing in common:
Believing in them will discourage you, give you an excuse to throw in the towel and abandon your Finnish studies.
The truth is much kinder: none of these things are actually stopping you. They're just stories – ones you picked up somewhere along the way, usually from someone who meant well but didn't quite have the full picture.
You don't need to be a child.
You don't need to move to Finland.
You don't need six months of full-time study.
You do need the right kind of exposure, consistently, for as long as it takes (which is probably shorter than you think once you stop wasting time on beginner furniture vocabulary...)
So, good luck to all you Finnish language learners – I know you can do it, even if you don’t live in Finland, even if the basics of Finnish seem difficult, or even if it’s been far too long since your childhood!
If you want to stop letting these myths dictate how you learn Finnish and start learning in a way that actually works, my free masterclass is a great place to start.
I’ll show you where to start, what kind of Finnish you should be exposing yourself to, and how to make real-life Finnish start feeling less like gibberish.
Published on 7 October 2026.