Finnish from Afar Blog

Drinking is a very important part of Finnish life. So it's no surprise that Finns have many jokes involving drinking. I mentioned a co...

This week was an important one for The Death of Gagarin. No, I am not referring to the death in 1968 of Russian cosmonaute Yuri Gagarin (R...

This summer, a group of us were walking along Esplanadi in Helsinki on our way to the restaurant Kapelli, when Noah, aged 14 and visiting fr...

This blog has been a little neglected in the past couple of weeks. But I have a good excuse: I was lazing around on the Caribbean island of ...

Apparently, a common way of congratulating someone in Finnish is: Onnea, onnea, onnea vaan! Punainen tupa ja perunamaa! Contratulations (x...

Lovely as Finland can be at times, I have always wondered why the Finns chose to settle in that inhospitable northern corner of Europe – b...

When your knowledge of a language is fairly basic, understanding what people say is largely guess-work. It relies on trying to link logicall...

Back in late March, as I stood in 50cm (20 inches) of snow in the Finnish countryside, I was told that spring was in in the air . This wee...

At a recent event, I wanted to say a few nice words in Finnish about someone dear to me. As there is no way I could ad-lib something like th...